Comment by gbear0

The default editor is usually configurable (of course you'd have to learn all the different contexts you can do this from first to know this is a thing ... discoverability is hard).

For example in ubuntu you can do

  sudo update-alternatives --config editor

Some programs will use the environment variable $EDITOR, so you can add this to your shell startup configs

  export EDITOR=vi

Or specifically for git cli you can run

  git config --global core.editor vi