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?

Comments

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/

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.