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

Just follow this project BRIEF for JED
1. Install the required packages: developer version of libslang; slsh (part of slang), gcc, make and autoconf. Additional xlib development packages will be needed for xjed. 
apt-get remove jed
apt-get build-dep jed

2. Build my version of JED (source code): 

git clone https://github.com/nereusx/jed
cd jed
mkdir /usr/share/jed
ln -s /usr/share/jed /usr/jed
./configure --prefix=/usr
make
# make xjed
make install

3. Install my CBRIEF scripts and configuration as I use it every day. 

git clone https://github.com/nereusx/dotfiles
cd dotfiles
mkdir ~/.backup
mkdir ~/.backup/{text,saves}
cp -r .jed ~/

4. Setup environment variables in your shell's startup files. 

# for [t]csh
setenv JED_HOME ${HOME}/.jed

# for bash/ksh
JED_HOME="${HOME}/.jed"
export JED_HOME

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

Original source: brief.vim

Copy this modified version of brief.vim, into ~/.vim/plugin/ directory.

If its not recognise alt-keys at terminal, append this file altkeys.vim, into ~/.vimrc.

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...