I realize I could run 2.11BSD on it, and as long as I stay away from a networking stack, I probably won't see too many coremap overflow errors.  But I think I'd really rather run V7.

However, there's one thing that makes it a less than ideal environment for me.  I grew up after cursor-addressable terminals were a thing, and, even if I can eventually make "ed" do what I want, it isn't much fun.  I've been an Emacs user since 1988 and my muscle memory isn't going to change soon (and failing being able to find and build Gosmacs or an early GNU Emacs, yes, I can get by in vi more easily than in ed; all those years playing Nethack poorly were good for something).

So...where can I find a curses implementation (and really all I need in the termcap or terminfo layer is ANSI or VTxxx) that can be coerced into building on V7 pretty easily?

Also, I think folks here might enjoy reading a little personal travelogue of some early Unix systems from my perspective (which is to say, a happy user of Unix for 30+ years but hardly ever near core development (I did do the DIAG 250 block driver for the zSeries port of OpenSolaris; then IBM pushed a little too hard on the price and Sun sold itself to (ugh) Oracle instead; the world would have been more fun if IBM had bought the company like we were betting on)).  That's at https://athornton.dreamwidth.org/14340.html ; that in turn references a review I did about a year ago of The Unix Hater's Handbook, at https://athornton.dreamwidth.org/14272.html . 

Adam