BRIEF was a very popular programmer's text editor in the early 1980s. It was designed and developed by UnderWare Inc, a company founded in Providence Rhode Island by David Nanian and Michael Strickman and published by Solution Systems. UnderWare moved to Boston Massachusetts in 1985; in 1990 UnderWare sold BRIEF to Solution Systems who released version 3.1 but a year later sold the product 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. Some Vim and Emacs packages provide Brief functionality.

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

Clones

• Boxer
• Short
• Terse
• CrispEditor from Vital - one of the few remaining Brief clones

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.

• Borland C++ 5.0
• Borland Delphi
• Borland JBuilder
• JED - by John E. Davis
• Microsoft Visual Studio 2005
• Platform Builder for Microsoft Windows CE 5.0
• RimStar
• TheSemwareEditor
• Zeus

References

External links

• Brief Compatible Programmers Text Editor
• Shareware Brief
• TextEditors Wiki: BriefFamily