Linux® From Scratch - Quality of Life (System V Edition) - Version #0a75

Chapter 5. SVR4-style Tools

heirloom-ex-vi-bd1f88

Introduction to heirloom-ex-vi

The heirloom-ex-vi package, also known as “The Traditional Vi”, is a portable version of 2.11BSD/SVR4 vi.

Package Information

[Note]

Note

During extraction, you may get the following message(s): 

unzip: Cannot set mode for '...': Operation not supported

You may ignore said message(s), everything is fine. It is caused by an attempt to set the file attributes on a symbolic link, which are ignored on most Unix and Unix-like systems, a notable exception being macOS.

Additional Downloads

heirloom-ex-vi Dependencies

Required

libarchive (to unpack the distribution)

Optional

The X Window System (to use wvi)

Installation of heirloom-ex-vi

Apply a patch to make the installation paths conform with the others in this category: 

patch -Np1 -i ../heirloom-ex-vi-bd1f88-paths.patch

Install heirloom-ex-vi by running the following command: 

./configure &&
make

Now, as the root user: 

make install

Configuring heirloom-ex-vi

Config Files

~/.exrc

Configuration Information

The above file can be used to configure the editor. The defaults are fine, but the configuration file gets ignored if anyone except the user executing vi has the ability to write to it. Make sure the file's octal permission value is 644 or similar in case you want to use it.

Contents

Installed Programs: edit (link to ex), ex, expreserve, exrecover, vedit (link to ex), view (link to ex), vi (link to ex), and wvi
Installed Libraries: None
Installed Directories: /var/preserve

Short Descriptions

edit

is a symlink pointing to ex

ex

is the text editor

expreserve

preserves files into /var/preserve

exrecover

recovers files from /var/preserve

vedit

is a symlink pointing to ex

vi

is a symlink pointing to ex

view

is a symlink pointing to ex

wvi

is a script that opens vi in a separate xterm