If you don't like vim to be installed as an editor on your LFS system, you may want to download an alternative and install an editor you prefer. There are a few hints how to install different editors available at http://cvs.linuxfromscratch.org/index.cgi/hints/editors/
You need to unpack both the vim-rt and vim-src packages to install Vim. Both packages will unpack their files into the vim-5.7 directory. This won't overwrite any files from the other package. So it doesn't mattter in which order you do it. Install Vim by running the following commands:
./configure --prefix=/usr &&
make &&
make install &&
cd /usr/bin &&
ln -s vim vi
If you are planning on installing the X Window system on your LFS system, you might want to re-compile Vim after you have installed X. Vim comes with a nice GUI version of the editor which requires X and a few other libraries to be installed. For more information read the Vim documentation.
The Vim package contains the ctags, etags, ex, gview, gvim, rgview, rgvim, rview, rvim, view, vim, vimtutor and xxd programs.
ctags generate tag files for source code.
etags does the same as ctags but it can generate cross reference files which list information about the various source objects found in a set of lanugage files.
ex starts vim in Ex mode.
gview is the GUI version of view.
gvim is the GUI version of vim.
rgview is teh GUI version of rview.
rgvim is the GUI version of rvim.
rview is a restricted version of view. No shell commands can be started and Vim can't be suspended.
rvim is the restricted version of vim. No shell commands can be started and Vim can't be suspended.
view starts vim in read-only mode.
vim starts vim in the normal, default way.
vimtutor starts the Vim tutor.
xxd makes a hexdump or does the reverse.