Termcap and termlib from 2BSD should work fine on standard V6/V7 - that's what they were originally written for.  You don't need curses for vi or emacs, they have their own comparable code internally.  In fact, the original 2BSD curses from Ken Arnold was basically the vi code pulled out into a separate library.

Warren Montgomery's emacs was internal to Bell Labs and intended for Bell Labs versions of PDP-11 UNIX, not 2BSD, although I recall it was often ported to the Vax. I can't recall which version of UNIX they ran in the various Computer Centers in the early 1980s when this happened, but I doubt it was V7; probably PWB or UNIX/TS. It would have had the Ritchie C compiler. I can't recall if it used termcap or had the terminals hardcoded - apparently both, according to this:

https://tech-insider.org/unix/research/1983/0119.html

    Mary Ann

Two more thoughts...

1.) Zimmerman EMACS (a.k.a. CCA EMACS) ran on the PDP-11 originally when Steve wrote it at MIT.  It's the closest to the original ITS/PDP-10 emacs of all the originals that I knew.    I'm pretty sure he converted it to Pavel's freely available terminfo implementation at some point (when he was at Masscomp), but I think the original Zimmerman code has screwed down terminal support to a couple of terminals that were used at MIT.   I've lost track of Steve, but I'll see if I can find you an email by reaching out on an Alumni list.

2.) I believe the first (joy created) termcap was in 2BSD but I don't think Arnold and Horton had started to pull the curses library out of vi yet.  I think termcap itself had been but Mary Ann would be more authoritative than I.  Check out the 2BSD, 3BSD, and 4BSD releases and look for the earliest versions.   The C compiler is pretty much the same in all cases (the only issue I can think is that by 3BSD folks at UCB had removed dmr's 7 character variable limit), but I think curses should compile without too much issue on a virgin dmr V7 compiler.

ᐧ

On Tue, Jun 11, 2019 at 8:20 AM <ron@ronnatalie.com> wrote:

The other early "emacs" we ran before switching to gosmacs was
JOVE--Jonathan's Own Version of Emacs.