Comment Re:vi is for building emacs (Score 1) 412
Ahh, a fellow Berkeley student.
To give you a few hints, Instructional Support's Solaris boxes do in fact use the GNU userland utilities (Sun's userland sucks, as mentioned above).
tcsh *should* be the default shell; if for whatever reason your account is screwed up, log in to update.cs to get a menu to change your shell, password, and so on.
Emacs is most definitely installed, and you can invoke vim as 'vim'.