It's not the default everywhere. Some platforms default with nano. The reason vi(m) and nano are defaults is because they're included in base installs (which a

It's not the default everywhere. Some platforms default with nano. The reason vi(m) and nano are defaults is because they're included in base installs (which a default would need to be). And the reason they're part of base installs is because they have a low footprint. Having, for example, VSCode as the default wouldn't make much sense because base installs might not even have Xorg / Wayland installed. Changing the default is easy though, it's literally just an environmental variable named $EDITOR