Brief (text editor)

Brief (stylized BRIEF or B.R.I.E.F., a backronym for Basic Reconfigurable Interactive Editing Facility), is a once-popular programmer's text editor in the 1980s and early 1990s. It was originally released for MS-DOS, then IBM OS/2 and Microsoft Windows. The Brief interface and functionality live on, including via the SourceForge GRIEF editor.^[1]

Brief
Screenshot of a sample Brief session
Original author(s)	UnderWare, Inc.
Developer(s)	Borland International
Initial release	1985; 40 years ago (1985)
Stable release	3.1 / May 16, 1992; 33 years ago (1992-05-16)
Operating system	MS-DOS, OS/2, Windows
Platform	x86
Type	Text editor

History

Brief was designed and developed by UnderWare Inc,^[2] a company founded in Providence, Rhode Island by David Nanian and Michael Strickman,^[3] and was published by Solution Systems. UnderWare moved to Boston, Massachusetts in 1985. Solution Systems released version 2.1 in 1988.^[4]

In 1990, UnderWare sold Brief to Solution Systems, which released version 3.1.^[5]

Solution Systems advertised the $195 Brief as a "Program Editing Breakthrough! / Get 20% More Done".^[6] Solution Systems closed permanently after the sale to Borland. Brief is no longer sold by Borland.

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
• Ability to set extremely high key-repeat rates

Brief for Windows features

• All the features of Brief for DOS and OS/2
• The first programmer's editor to make use of the Windows WYSIWYG environment
• Color coding of language constructs
• Multitask within Windows environment
• Full use of Windows memory for caching all files and macros
• Ability to spawn off compiles to a DOS box without leaving the editor

Popularity

Both the Brief interface and its functionality had a following, and they live on via SourceForge's GRIEF.^[1]

Clones

Some Vim and Emacs packages provide Brief functionality. There was more than one program written to provide Brief-like functionality:

• Brief Basic
• Brief Editor^[7]
• Boxer
• Short
• Terse
• CRiSP^[8]
• GRIEF^[1]
• SlickEdit
• Zeus

Emulators

The Brief keyboard layout became popular and was implemented in or emulated by other editors, such as Lugaru Epsilon, by providing a remapping of the keyboard shortcuts and editor behavior; dBase, an early DOS-day database, also copied this keyboard mapping.^{[9] [10]}

• Borland C++ 5.0
• CodeWright
• Embarcadero Delphi, formerly Borland
• Embarcadero JBuilder, formerly Borland
• JED - by John E. Davis
• Lugaru Epsilon
• Microsoft Visual Studio (Built-in) 6, 2003, 2005, 2008
• Microsoft Visual Studio (via Addin) 2010, 2012, 2013^[11]
• Platform Builder for Microsoft Windows CE 5.0^[12]
• RimStar
• TextPad
• The SemWare Editor
• VEDIT
• CRiSP Editor Emulator (Emacs CRiSP mode)^[13]
• BRIEF Editor Emulator (Emacs BRIEF mode)^[14][15]