Well, hallelujah, after much travail (I've tried this every Christmas for at least 5 years now), I have succeeded in building vi on v7 from 2bsd. Had to patch the c compiler to enlarge the symbol table, tweak some stuff here and there, but it finally built and installed without any errors, yay.

Now, I just want it to do some editing, preferably in visual mode. I can call it as ex or vi:

# ex
:

or

# vi

:

and q will exit, yay, again!

I have at least two problems:
1. It's not going "full" screen, even with TERM=vt100 or TERM=ansi set (not that I was surprised, but it'd be nice)...

2. If I type a for append and type something, there's no way to get back to the : prompt (ESC doesn't seem to work).
3. I'd like manpages (figure they might help with the above), but they're on the tape as .u files?

I'm hoping this triggers some, oh yeah I remember that, type responses.

Thanks,

Will