How to get vi or vi like editor on an android Samsung galaxy tablet

Question

I'm using an Android Samsung Galaxy 10.1 tablet, and I downloaded terminal from the market; I want to edit a network host file. However, there does not appear to be a text editor in terminal. Does anyone know how to get vi on the tablet or something similar?

In short, what is the most straight forward way to edit files on the Samsung tab 10.1 Thanks!

Answer 1

You could use the busybox version of vi. If you're rooted then you can get it from the Market and it will install pretty trivially (example). Then you'd just need to execute vi from a terminal and you're good to go. I don't know of any installers that don't require root, but there may be one floating around somewhere that will install to /data/local or something.

Alternatively, you can do it the "manual" way. The following should work fine on an unrooted phone:

• Download a busybox binary or build it yourself (the busybox website hosts ARM binaries that should work).
• Copy the binary over to /data/local somehow. adb is easy if you have it set up - just connect your tablet and use: adb push /path/to/busybox /data/local. You could also put it on your SD card and then move it with a file manager. You may optionally want to rename it to simply busybox (I'll assume this is the case in the next steps).
• You may need to use chmod to make it executable, which can be done from either a terminal emulator or an adb shell - chmod 0755 /data/local/busybox should suffice.
• Execute vi from a terminal with /data/local/busybox vi.

Of course, if you just want any ol' editor you don't have to use vi. There are a bunch in the Market.

Answer 2

Android Market has aVim Editor(Vi/Vim). It is not free and has some poor reviews.