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No, but this is. IOW, if you want Qedit, you know where to find it. :)

Regarding Brief, have you looked at Zeus? http://www.zeusedit.com/index.html

Personally I'm a WordStar luddite who uses Semware's TSE http://www.semware.com/

So you'll have to learn an architecture. Intel 386 is a great place to start...

Choke. Cough. Laugh. Thanks a lot, now I have to clean soda off my keyboard.

While the rest of your comment is pretty much spot on, this advice is, frankly, absurd. x86 has one of the most convoluted, non-orthogonal, legacy-laden instruction sets and list of constraints of any architecture, ever.

This is exactly why you should start with the i386.

I am extremely glad I started with DOS (and PC Write, Qedit and Word for DOS, for that matter). Windows apps are trivially easy to use with that as a foundation. Similarly, I consider myself lucky to have English as a first language -- anything but Russian seems almost boring by comparison. French, despite being forced down my Canadian throat, was more consistent and had a fraction of the vocabulary. And Spanish was a lark in comparison to French.

Slashdotter parents, give your child(ren) the toughest language, the weakest editor and the pokiest computer -- I guaranty this will produce more benefit to them than paying their way through college. Slashdotter parents? Hello???

Yeah man, I totally love joe. I've been using that editor since when I first downloaded Linux (Slackware) over a BBS in the late nineties. It bridged the gap between my experiences with vi (which were the result of running the Waffle BBS software package) and my power-user status with that old workhorse for MS-DOS, QEdit, which was just starting to get crappy while Semware took their little tight shareware app and tricked it out to be a commercial product (which apparently is keeping them in business??)

Joe has the simplicity of MS-DOS EDIT.COM/EXE with much, much more power, and is a nice way to get used to using a *NIX-based system; luckily it's managed to stick around in the cut-throat unix text editor marketplace *ahem*...

in my opinion.

It's FAST, VERY light (my executable is 150K), full with features, configurable pretty much for everything, contains a macro language that lets you create new commands, and has EVERYTHING without becoming bloated.

The only downside is that it's a commercial non-free program. But it's worth every single penny, I say.

Go to Semware, and download the trial version. I can't speak for others, but I love it a lot. When using Windows*, TSE-Pro and 4DOS/4NT are the two programs I use most.

By the way: Notepad is HIDEOUS. It might be standard, yes, but it's so primitive it becomes heavily restrictive. I carry around with me a diskette with my personal vital tools, text editor included, so I can skip the pain of using notepad on other people's computers.

in my opinion.

It's FAST, VERY light (my executable is 150K), full with features, configurable pretty much for everything, contains a macro language that lets you create new commands, and has EVERYTHING without becoming bloated.

The only downside is that it's a commercial non-free program. But it's worth every single penny, I say.

Go to Semware, and download the trial version. I can't speak for others, but I love it a lot. When using Windows*, TSE-Pro and 4DOS/4NT are the two programs I use most.

By the way: Notepad is HIDEOUS. It might be standard, yes, but it's so primitive it becomes heavily restrictive. I carry around with me a diskette with my personal vital tools, text editor included, so I can skip the pain of using notepad on other people's computers.

My colleagues at work think *I* am nuts because I refuse to use notepad or Visual Café's builtin-text editor to edit .java source files, preferring instead a much more powerful older DOS-based text editor (TSE). They're gonna suffer a heart attack when they see this.

• if it has a basic user mode, then it MUST have a power-user mode. I hate it when an app won't let me do what I want, forcing me instead through stupid menus.
  
  
• Configuration files are GOOD. For a user who groks the app, it's much quicker to edit the .CFG (.ini, rc, whatever) than having to go to the configuration menu/window. Let him do so if he so wishes. Configuration files should be properly commented, too.
  
  
• On-the-fly reconfiguration. This heavily depends on the type of app, but as few options as possible should require restarting.
  
  
• Take the pain to write a GOOD help section. Windows apps, for example, have a well organized help system, with perfectly useless content. Have
  some friends that know nothing of the app come by and try it, and record whatever they ask. Have some power-users come, grok the app, and THEN record whatever they ask. Meaty help, please.
  
  
• An app should do whatever it's supposed to do, and interface properly with other apps that do other stuff instead of trying to do it itself. For example, tin (the Usenet news client) doesn't have an internal text editor, but rather invokes your editor of choice (vi, EMACS, TSE, whatever). Bloat is bad.
  
  
• Batch mode is good. Let me use an actual example: I once had to convert 300+ files from .GIF to .PNG. With an interactive app, this takes more or less 30 seconds of user input for EACH file, and it would have been tiring as hell. Instead, I decided to use some Unix utilites (gif2ppm, ppm2xpm and xpm2png in a chain), took some minutes writing a shell script to process each file, and left the job on its own while I got to do other stuff... and it took less overall time.
  
  
• If you port your app to different OSs, they MUST behave in the same way in each system (obviously there's a limit held by an OS ability to do something). For example, "save file" can't be F2 in Windows and CTRL-S in Unix.
  
  
• If yor app contains an internal scripting language or something like that, document the source and let the users access it. (The TSE editor is a great example of this).
  
  
• If your app contains a lot of internal power (usually this is the case for apps with an internal scripting language), an internal command line sometimes helps solve easily some tasks. I kid you not.
  
  
• Organize the app's files neatly into subdirectories. Having to search for a saved document in a 500+ files directory, especially when you don't know the exact name of the file, and there are internal ones that could be them, too, isn't pretty. A "saved documents" directory is good.
  
  

That's all I can think of for now.

I use a venerable DOS shareware program called qe.exe (QuickEdit 2.06). It's dated 5/19/1988 and takes all of 48K. It always runs, never complains, is fast and pretty easy to use. There are a couple things I wish it did, but since I can run it on any M$ box from DOS 2.11 to NT 4.0, it's just fine.

There is a current version called The SemWare Editor which has a few more bells and whistles.

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