Using vim to do this seems silly. Nano is also nearly always present, and doing those “basic” things is 10x more straightforward in an editor that isn’t modal and just gets out of your way.

I’ve often in my career witnessed engineers who’ve cargo culted the need for vim, but they only know how to hit ESC !wq or whatever, and one errant keystroke puts them in modal hell of some sort that, often requiring they just close the terminal and try again.

I don’t begrudge those who want to become power-VIM-users, though it seems wildly awkward to me, to each their own. But if you just want to use it to do the “basics” on ssh sessions, using nano makes more sense. PGUP and PGDN and Home and End and arrows work just fine to navigate, and the bindings for most things are printed right on the screen (except Ctrl-S to save… for some reason, but it works).