I believe EDITOR=vim in turn stems from vim being able to run in restricted mode. I once saw a hardcore emacs user forced to use vim because he was building a

I believe EDITOR=vim in turn stems from vim being able to run in restricted mode. I once saw a hardcore emacs user forced to use vim because he was building a setup that allowed shell users to edit a file. And couldn't do that in emacs. So he had to use rvim -y. I myself once built a nethack shell server where I used rvim to allow users to edit their nethackrc. So distros preferring vim can either stem from it being vi-compatible which is POSIX. And/or from having a restricted mode.