[jrockway]

The Debian base system comes with both vim-tiny and nano. Nano is the default; when the installer wants you to edit something, you get nano:

    $ ls -l ./etc/alternatives/editor
    lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 9 Sep  7 06:19 ./etc/alternatives/editor -> /bin/nano

If you want to use vim for development, use vim. But "it's the default" is simply an untrue statement. Vim (-full) is no more "the default" than Emacs. Both need to be manually installed on nearly every operating system.

(OpenBSD ships with both nvi and mg, FWIW.)