The Vim package contains a powerful text editor. &buildtime; &vim-time; &diskspace; &vim-compsize; &aa-vim-down; &aa-vim-dep;   If you prefer another editor -- like Emacs, Joe, or Nano -- to Vim, have a look at for suggested installation instructions.   First change the default locations of the vimrc and gvimrc files to /etc. echo '#define SYS_VIMRC_FILE "/etc/vimrc"' >> src/feature.h echo '#define SYS_GVIMRC_FILE "/etc/gvimrc"' >> src/feature.h Now prepare Vim for compilation: ./configure --prefix=/usr Compile the package: make To have the results tested, you can issue: make check. However, this test suite outputs a lot of seemingly garbage characters to the screen, and this can wreak havoc with the settings of the current terminal. Accordingly, the running of the test suite here is strictly optional. And install the package: make install When called as vi, vim will run in old-fashioned vi-mode. To allow this, create a symlink: ln -s vim /usr/bin/vi If you are going to install the X Window system on your LFS system, you may want to re-compile Vim after having installed X. Vim comes with a nice GUI version of the editor that requires X and a few other libraries to be installed. For more information read the Vim documentation.   By default, vim runs in vi-compatible mode. Some people might like this, but we prefer to run vim in its own mode (else we wouldn't have included it in this book, but the original vi). Create a default vim configuration file by running the following: cat > /etc/vimrc << "EOF" " Begin /etc/vimrc set nocompatible set backspace=2 syntax on " End /etc/vimrc EOF The set nocompatible will make vim behave in a more useful way than the default vi-compatible manner. The set backspace=2 allows backspacing over line breaks, autoindent and the start of insert. And the syntax on switches on vim's semantic colouring. &aa-vim-shortdesc; &aa-vim-desc;