Brief (text editor)


Brief, 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.

History

Brief was designed and developed by UnderWare Inc, a company founded in Providence, Rhode Island by David Nanian and Michael Strickman, and was published by Solution Systems. UnderWare moved to Boston, Massachusetts in 1985. Solution Systems released version 2.1 in 1988.
In 1990, UnderWare sold Brief to Solution Systems, which released version 3.1.
Solution Systems advertised the $195 Brief as a "Program Editing Breakthrough! / Get 20% More Done".
Solution Systems closed permanently after the sale to Borland. Brief is no longer sold by Borland.

Features

The original product features contain:

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.

Clones

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

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.