I am also extremely happy with its performance, and the ease of use of tools such as emerge, I was kind of annoyed that it used nano as the default with no vi included in the stage, but I quickly got over it after I managed to emerge vi, openRC is a real breeze to use as well, and the build process wasn't nearly as hard as I thought it would be.

I love this Distro, I wish I had tried it long ago.

I am thinking of installing Gentoo, and it is very encouraging to read posts such as yours

Thanks and congratulations!

Well, it could be vim, yes. But then someone would just complain that it's not emacs You get the idea...

First, nano dependency list is much shorter and lighter.

Second, and let's face it, if you have no clue about vim or emacs, you have no idea how to exit the editor once you have started it. In nano you just have to read the bottom bar to operate it. So, it's a question of leveraging the process. It's better if 99% of the users can use a simple editor at turtle-speed than if only 30% of the users can use a programmers editor at the speed of light.

Anyway, it's not like you have to write your own compiler to install Gentoo or something. Usually, only slight modifications in several files are the only thing that you need to get your system into a bootable state, and that can be done in virtually any editor. From there, you can emerge vim, xemacs or eclipse if that's what it takes for you to edit system files

Here's the sequence for vi: :q :quit :exit :quit! :help help helpquit quit quithelp :quitplease :quitnow :leave ^X ^C ^D ^Z ^Q QUITDAMMIT Ctrl+Alt+Del

BTW, one can use eselect to set default editor.