[QuinnyPig]

I can’t recall encountering a system in the last 15 years that didn’t have vim (or at least vi for esoteric things) on it.

[SoftTalker]

Would not be uncommon in a container or purpose-built VM.

[godelski]

Have you run into that? I can't recall ever facing that issue. Seems very weird to strip down that much and then use a different editor. Do you remember if ed was missing in those machines?

[godelski]

While not mandatory, vi is part of the POSIX commands. I mean you could use ed or even hack your way with awk, sed, and/or grep but no one wants to deal with that bullshit. And if you're installing vi you might as well install vim, right?

I've been on a lot of systems and can't remember a single instance of not having vi (though I do vim). So pretty rare, like you said

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_POSIX_commands