Nicholas Christopoulos Personal Site
About BRIEF Text Editor

About BRIEF

BRIEF (Basic Re-configurable Interactive Editing Facility) was a very powerful and popular programmer's text editor in the 80s. Even now all big IDEs had BRIEF emulation and there are many commercial clones.

It was designed and developed by UnderWare Inc, and was published by Solution Systems. In 1990, UnderWare sold BRIEF to Solution Systems which released version 3.1, the last sold BRIEF to Borland in 1993. BRIEF was available for DOS and OS/2.

BRIEF had a good lisp-like macro language and many macros. The Borland's version was uses C-style macro language and got the nickname CBRIEF.

BRIEF for JED

JED For BRIEF project at codeberg.org

There are a few differnces of the orignal. I dont like much function keys, so I use Alt keys for find next/previous occurrence in search, [Alt+S]/[Alt+T] = as the original, [Alt+F] = find next, [Ctrl+F] = find previous. [Alt+F] was used in BRIEF to show the filename, that is useless today, also you can see it better in buffers list [Alt+B].

I did, additional modifications for laptops that can be canceled by flags (laptop-mode) in ~/.jed/.jedrc or in ~/.jed/cbrief.sl
Laptop-mode: [Ctrl+Left] = Home, [Ctrl+Right] = End, [Ctrl+Up] = PgUp, [Ctrl+Down] = PgDn.

BRIEF for VIM

VIM, BRIEF emulation at codeberg.org

BRIEF for EMACS

Luke Lee BRIEF emulation for EMACS

BRIEF for NANO

Nano, it has only basic capabilities. Also it does not support shift/alt/ctrl combinations with function keys. Copy this brief-nanorc.txt file to ~/.nanorc.

Other...