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Been playing around with Think C on my old macs after seeing these videos and it’s great bc fun but I really miss my modern vim. Does anyone know if it’s possible to cross compile or something? (Tried a shared folder with apple share but the resource fork of the source file gets clobbered)

System 6 is older than me so I don’t know all the stuff that people do from back in the day.

I'm pretty sure vi/m needs a proper terminal, so... actually that might not be surmountable, given that there were probably BBS clients back then. But I suspect it would be easier to write a file system adapter that could let you safely share the files then to try and support a modern program in that kind of resource constrained environment.
Knowing vim, there has to be a classic Mac version.
Getting Vim to run on a Macintosh Plus with System 6 is actually a project I’m currently working on. The old Mac Vim binary versions 5.7 and 6.2 will only run on System 7 and up, and in my testing require a computer with color capabilities.

Progress is slow. There’s a lot of surface area; Vim’s codebase, the Macintosh toolbox routines, getting the code to build with CodeWarrior in a VM, setting up all the right libraries, and then running/testing it in a different VM.

Current status is that Vim can startup and you can enter text and quasi save it to a file. Movement commands work. But there’s a LOT more to do.

Resources to get started for those who may be curious:

https://github.com/vim/vim-history/ older source code, I’m currently working off the 6.2.350 tag

https://vintageapple.org/ amazing site for technical info

https://macintoshgarden.org/ resource for old Mac software

May be easier with one of the derivatives which come in with smaller code bases.
Dude has an original kensington trackball. Mad props
"Hello Cyberpals!" he started with. That's instant coolness.