Is BRIEF Compatible Editor for Unix?

duplex asks: "In the dark ages of DOS real programmers used BRIEF. This editor conceived at Borland (I think) had a very unique keymap which involved the Meta (Alt) key a lot. I got used to it and the mapping became my second nature. There are some great descendants of BRIEF on Windoze that do an excellent job at emulating the functionality (most notably Codewright and MultiEdit). Unfortunately there isn't a good one for Unix apart from CRiSP. I'm the breed that grew up using BRIEF in DOS so not having a BRIEF clone puts me off doing any serious Linux work. I wonder if there is perhaps a less known editor out there that supports the full set of BRIEF bindings. I can do away with syntax highlighting and whatnot but BRIEF bindings are a must. I'm not really into spending megabucks on CRiSP because the licensing of it is quite inflexible. There must be lots more developers who prefer BRIEF bindings over EPSILON/Emacs or VI. Is there a project aimed at bringing the power of BRIEF to the Open Source community?" Most of the Unix editors are configurable enough where even the keybindings can be changed. The submittor did mention that he did not like Emacs, but couldn't Emacs or its cousin X-Emacs be configured for the task? Couldn't VIM be scripted into BRIEF submission?

Crisp

[ptomblin]

I know the current version of Crisp is a commercial product with expensive licensing, but a long, long time ago an early version of it was posted to comp.sources.unix. Maybe you could dig up that version and use it?

Or maybe you should retrain your fingers to use vim, you won't regret it.

--
A "freaking free-loading Canadian" stealing jobs from good honest hard working Americans since 1997.

SlickEdit

[bonehead]

It's a bit pricey, but Visual SlickEdit [slickedit.com] has BRIEF emulation, and a Linux port.

Aside from the price, it's an excellent all-around programmer's editor.

ask Borland/Inprise to release Brief

[iguana]

I used Brief way back in my Dos days and still miss it a great deal. Visual Slickedit is a good substitiute, but it's not quite fast enough and has a few quirks.

I've talked to Borland/Inprise people off and on at trade shows about releasing the source code to Brief to the OSS/GNU community. Seems like it would be a great PR move.

I'd love to have a Linux console editor as fast, intuitive, and flexible as Brief.

Free Brief!

Re:*nix editing problems: word wrap

[Mental Erosion]

In vim, type 'gqap' (without the quotes) with the cursor inside the paragraph you want to nicely format.

Re:*nix editing problems: word wrap

[jason_aw]

Just because Windows editors do it, doesn't make it right... I'd be incredibly pissed off if vi started doing that. I want my text editor to show me exactly what is in the file, not piss around wrapping words. If it started doing that, how can you tell where your line actually ends?

The most important property of text editors is that they show the text exactly how it is. *Real* wysiwyg ;-)

Re:*nix editing problems: word wrap

[dead_penguin]

Try nedit. You can get it at www.nedit.org.
It should do what you want.
The only downside to it is that it is X based, so forget using it from a console.

Brief

[jflynn]

I haven't found a decent replacement for Brief under Linux yet either. I did try jed, but either I misconfigured it or the emulation was not sufficient. Crisp looks to be the choice, but the license is draconian and expensive as you say. I can use either vi or Emacs, but I feel like I'm programming with lead gloves on :) 15 years of muscle memory doesn't go away quietly...

I've used TECO, Vedit, KED, EDLIN, WS, and a lot of other editors quite a bit. I've never found better or less buggy than Brief though, so I'm still using it on the Windows side. Having a strong open source clone of Brief would be a really strong incentive for me to shut Windows down for the last time. Perhaps I am feeling the beginnings of an itch here...

I have yet to try Brief under DOSEMU though (need to grab a DOS image.) I hope that works better than I expect.

Re:*nix editing problems: word wrap

[steelhawk]

I use VIM [vim.org] (Vi IMproved) a lot... and I don't recognize your problems at all... maybe you should try VIM?

If you like Vi I think it could be worth it... gvim is also available if you want a GTK version...


---
Tip: Sick and tired of these tips? Type "set tips 0" any time.
> set tips 0
Error: Unknown option name "tips."

Re:*nix editing problems: word wrap

[steelhawk]

Jeeez... what kind of link did I do?! ;)
Sorry!

VIM homepage here [vim.org]
---
Tip: Sick and tired of these tips? Type "set tips 0" any time.
> set tips 0
Error: Unknown option name "tips."

Brief editor for programmers

[jkirby]

Actually, Brief was written by UnderWare, Inc. and was then bought by Solution Systems. Solutions Systems sold Brief to Borland. Slick Edit is OK and it does a fine job of brief emulation. Do not know much abouyt Unix emulators, but Visual C++ has very good brief emulation. Jamey

Re:*nix editing problems: word wrap

[Harri]

In vim, you can do

:set linebreak

Then you can do gj and gk to move up and down on the lines as you see, not by the linebreaks.

You can of course map j and k to gj and gk in all files ending in .html or .txt.

I think this satisifes all your conditions?

Emacs and JBuilder both have Brief keymaps

[bhopki3]

I've used the Crisp keybinding that comes with Emacs to some degree of success. It still needs improvement (especially the cut/paste behavior) but it ain't bad. Plus it's free. Also, Borland recently posted Brief keymaps for the editor in the JBuilder IDE. JBuilder Foundation is also free.

Re:JED can emulate BRIEF

[Tet]

Can it? Last time I looked, the slang code for BRIEF emulation was coded specifically for the DOS version of jed, and I couldn't be bothered to learn enough slang to fix it to work for Linux.

Re:*nix editing problems: word wrap

[Tet]

Be able to do word wrap without inserting hard linefeeds in my files!! These just make it look wrong next time I open it up.

What an utterly bizzare feature to desire in a text editor. I'd hate an editor to do this -- you have no idea whether those spaces are really in your text, or just inserted by the editor for display purposes.

Still, as Harri mentioned, you can just do :set linebreak in vim to get the behaviour you want.

*nix editing problems: word wrap

[Pike]

I am rapidly progressing in learning vi for everyday editing, but one of the biggest problems with editors under Linux is the stupid way they handle word-wrap. It seems that the concept of soft-wrapping is foreign to Linux editors. Word wrapping is, or ought to be, a display issue, not a file formatting issue! In vi, you can set it to wrap words past a certain margin, but these are hard line-feeds, and when you go back and insert more text in the lines you must reformat the entire paragraph. Needless hassle.

The GTK editors I've tried all have the same problem. I confess I don't use emacs much since I don't have it installed on my little machine, but I do remember that words were not even wrapped properly the times I tried it. Maybe someone could enlighten me as to whether there is any way to get text editors under Linux to work for light HTML/word processing as well as for programming uses.

-JD

Re:*nix editing problems: word wrap

[Pike]

That's what I'm using, vim. It has the same stupid problem. Every linux editor has the same stupid problem! Forgive me if I rant a little at people who program text editors.

Look people I do not want to set a fixed wrap margin, I do not want hard returns inserted in my file for word wrap, and I do not want to have to hit enter every time I get to the end of the line! Any text editor worth its salt will do the following:

• Wrap my lines as I type
• Re-wrap the lines for me if I resize the window
• Re-wrap the lines for me if I later insert words in the line
• Allow true cursor freedom; let the cursor move up and down on the screen regardless of where hard returns are located (vi[m] is a particular failure here)
• Be able to do word wrap without inserting hard linefeeds in my files!! These just make it look wrong next time I open it up.

Not only are these these all-too-simple features lacking in EVERY SINGLE Linux editor I've tried (vim, jed, emacs, zed, pico, gtkedit, gnotepad, bluefish, gxedit, etc etc.), they are standard in EVERY Windows application that has ANY kind of text entry. Why is it so hard for Linux programmers to figure this out?? Yeah, it's a stable platform, but if what good is it if I can't even type up a short web page without messing around with this stuff?

-JD

Wasn't borland

[BethBear]

it was Underware Inc. Borland bought Underware
and brief errr' shrunk-in-the-wash.
Beth

JED can emulate BRIEF

[Glenn R-P]

http://space.mit.edu/~davis/jed.html

Visual SlickEdit

[LordNimon]

http://www.slickedit.com/ [slickedit.com]

I'm amazed about how few people know Visual SlickEdit. It is an amazing editor, and yes, it has some BRIEF compatibility. However, that's not it's strong point. It's very cross-platform (well, no Mac version, and the OS/2 version stops at 4.0), but mostly it's extremely powerful and configurable. You just have no idea how awesome this editor is until you've used it a couple weeks.

Unfortunately, it's closed-source and rather expensive. But I wouldn't use anything else.