I was seeing nano instead of vim when I was running things like crontab -e or git commit on this one machine. How infuriating is that? Well, I had finally had enough.
$ sudo update-alternatives --config editor
Will give you a choice. Likewise, if you run sudo aptitude install vim-full ubuntu will know that you are serious enough about vim to want it to be your default editor.
Ah, now I will never have the humiliation of typing :wq into nano again. With any luck, I will not have to go through the trouble of ctrl-o, enter, ctrl-x to save a file and exit. I guess either way it is five keys, but esc, :wq, enter is the righteous way to save and exit!
vim-full is no longer a package in ubuntu.
so, sudo apt-get install vim
and, if you would like to use vim as your python editor, you might want to checkout