I’ll show you a quick screenshot of levee, but it won’t impress you much.
Don’t feel bad if it looks a lot like vi. According to the home page, it’s supposed to. But here’s what might impress you, if you’re in the market for small programs. Via ps_mem.py …
Private + Shared = RAM used Program 172.0 KiB + 99.5 KiB = 271.5 KiB xinit 200.0 KiB + 118.5 KiB = 318.5 KiB levee 232.0 KiB + 107.0 KiB = 339.0 KiB dbus-launch ...
It’s not every day that you run across a vi clone that can run in plus-or-minus 318KiB. By comparison, vi editing the same file takes up more than 550KiB on my machine, and vim is running on a whopping 1.8MiB. So of the vi-ish options I have here, levee is definitely the lightest.
It’s also quite true to form. Navigation is strictly by H-J-K-L keys; pressing arrow keys will trigger a visual bell and quite possibly blind you. There are some other idiosyncrasies that might even make it more vi-like than vi. Watch your step. 😯
Aside from that, I can’t speak much about levee that hasn’t already been said about vi, or anything vi-like. I’m not a huge fan of vim, and so straight vi is barely usable for me. levee mimics its progenitor almost perfectly (from what I have seen), which is admirable, but no selling point for me.
But take from it what you will. There’s no reason to look down on an honest attempt at flattery, and rewriting someone else’s software to run in half the space … probably qualifies. 🙂
Inconsolation 
Yesterday I was trying traditional vi and nvi to tinker and get what of them was a more suitable alternative to nano for writing mails. I think that this (or sandy with the vi patches when it’ll be complete) will do, if the visual mode works (it’s missing in nvi, tvi simply prompted me to the ex mode even when starting vi). Thanks!