"Available" as in "can be installed if you wish"? Well, so are most other editors, including (but not limited to) Emacs, TECO and probably joe or something. - vi as defined by POSIX is not a graphical editor and it is definitely more overkill than ed for most text editing. Now why does POSIX need two standard text editors? If minimalism was important, they should just have ignored vi. And I actually prefer ed to vi - much for the same reason as why I prefer sam to acme for most of my non-programming tasks. sam, being a graphical multi-line ed, is a good example of what I meant by a "sane mixture" - a whole OS using the same UI language would be neat, in my opinion. (And yes, my usual IDE at home is still Emacs. ;-))

Graphical Windows installations can be automated with configuration files. Why can Microsoft do that and "Unix-like systems" can't? - Yup, people got used to the CLI, much like they got used to printers as the only output medium in the 60s. ;-)