Brief (text editor)
 Screenshot of a sample B.R.I.E.F. session |
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| Developer(s) | UnderWare, Inc. |
|---|---|
| Stable release | 3.1 |
| Operating system | DOS, OS/2, Microsoft Windows |
| Platform | x86 |
| Type | Text editor |
BRIEF was a very popular programmer's text editor in the 1980s and early 1990s.[1] It was designed and developed by UnderWare Inc, a company founded in Providence, Rhode Island by David Nanian and Michael Strickman, and was published by Solution Systems. UnderWare moved to Boston, Massachusetts in 1985. In 1990, UnderWare sold BRIEF to Solution Systems which released version 3.1, but a year later sold BRIEF to Borland. BRIEF was available for DOS and OS/2, and could run in a DOS console window under early versions of Microsoft Windows.
BRIEF is more accurately listed as B.R.I.E.F. - an acronym for Basic Reconfigurable Interactive Editing Facility. It is no longer sold by Borland.
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[edit] Features
The original product features contain:
- A Lisp-like macro language; later, a C-like macro language was added
- Completely configurable keyboard
- Template editing and smart indenting for all major micro-compilers
- Multiple undo/redo
- Unlimited file size (restricted only by disk space)
- Program compiling from within BRIEF, with "go to the next error line" service
- Support for all major popular compilers
- User configurations to support any other compiler with menu-driven setup
- EMS caching for all files and macros
- Mouse support
- Complete edit operations
- Regular expression search and replace
- Multiple windows, including multiple windows on the same source file
[edit] Clones
Some Vim and Emacs packages provide Brief functionality. There was more than one program written to provide Brief-like functionality:
- Brief Basic
- Boxer
- Short
- Terse
- CRiSP Editor from Vital
- Visual SlickEdit
- Zeus
[edit] Emulators
The Brief keyboard layout became popular and was implemented in or emulated by other editors by providing a remapping of the keyboard shortcuts and editor behaviour.[1]
- Borland C++ 5.0
- Borland Delphi
- CodeWright
- Borland JBuilder
- JED - by John E. Davis
- Microsoft Visual Studio 6, 2003, 2005, 2008
- Platform Builder for Microsoft Windows CE 5.0[2]
- RimStar
- TextPad
- The SemWare Editor
- VEDIT
[edit] References
- ^ a b "TextEditors Wiki: BriefFamily". http://www.texteditors.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?BriefFamily. Retrieved 2007-10-12.
- ^ "Text Editor Emulation". Microsoft. http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms937343.aspx. Retrieved 2007-10-12.
