Brief (stylized BRIEF or B.R.I.E.F., a

backronym A backronym is an acronym formed from an already existing word by expanding its letters into the words of a phrase. Backronyms may be invented with either serious or humorous intent, or they may be a type of false etymology or folk etymology. The ...

for Basic Reconfigurable Interactive Editing Facility), is a once-popular programmer's

text editor A text editor is a type of computer program that edits plain text. An example of such program is "notepad" software (e.g. Windows Notepad). Text editors are provided with operating systems and software development packages, and can be used to c ...

in the 1980s and early 1990s. It was originally released for

MS-DOS MS-DOS ( ; acronym for Microsoft Disk Operating System, also known as Microsoft DOS) is an operating system for x86-based personal computers mostly developed by Microsoft. Collectively, MS-DOS, its rebranding as IBM PC DOS, and a few op ...

, then

IBM International Business Machines Corporation (using the trademark IBM), nicknamed Big Blue, is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, and present in over 175 countries. It is ...

OS/2 OS/2 is a Proprietary software, proprietary computer operating system for x86 and PowerPC based personal computers. It was created and initially developed jointly by IBM and Microsoft, under the leadership of IBM software designer Ed Iacobucci, ...

and

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company, technology conglomerate headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975, the company became influential in the History of personal computers#The ear ...

Windows Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...

. The ''Brief'' interface and functionality live on, including via the ''SourceForge''

GRIEF Grief is the response to the loss of something deemed important, particularly to the death of a person to whom or animal to which a Human bonding, bond or affection was formed. Although conventionally focused on the emotional response to loss, ...

editor.

History

Brief was designed and developed by UnderWare Inc, a company founded in

Providence, Rhode Island Providence () is the List of capitals in the United States, capital and List of municipalities in Rhode Island, most populous city of the U.S. state of Rhode Island. The county seat of Providence County, Rhode Island, Providence County, it is o ...

by David Nanian and Michael Strickman, and was published by Solution Systems. UnderWare moved to

Boston, Massachusetts Boston is the capital and most populous city in the Commonwealth (U.S. state), Commonwealth of Massachusetts in the United States. The city serves as the cultural and Financial centre, financial center of New England, a region of the Northeas ...

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". In 1990 Solutions Systems brought in Eric Perkins as technical architect and team lead to port the OS/2 version of Brief to the Windows platform as quickly as possible. The end result was to sell the Solution System assets to the highest bidder. Within 6 months, the team of Eric Perkins, Blake Nelson and Jeff Simpson worked closely with David Nanian and Mike Strickman and ported Brief OS/2 to Windows using an MVC architecture. It was this version that was demonstrated at Spring Comdex 1991 to

Borland Borland Software Corporation was a computing technology company founded in 1983 by Niels Jensen, Ole Henriksen, Mogens Glad, and Philippe Kahn. Its main business was developing and selling software development and software deployment products. B ...

and others, with Borland later purchasing Brief and the full suite of software tools from Solutions Systems. Solution Systems closed permanently after the sale to

. 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 In computing, WYSIWYG ( ), an acronym for what you see is what you get, refers to software that allows content to be edited in a form that resembles its appearance when printed or displayed as a finished product, such as a printed document, web ...

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 SourceForge is a web service founded by Geoffrey B. Jeffery, Tim Perdue, and Drew Streib in November 1999. SourceForge provides a centralized software discovery platform, including an online platform for managing and hosting open-source soft ...

's GRIEF.

Clones

Some Vim and

Emacs Emacs (), originally named EMACS (an acronym for "Editor Macros"), is a family of text editors that are characterized by their extensibility. The manual for the most widely used variant, GNU Emacs, describes it as "the extensible, customizable, s ...

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

Emulators

The Brief

keyboard layout A keyboard layout is any specific physical, visual, or functional arrangement of the keys, legends, or key-meaning associations (respectively) of a computer keyboard, mobile phone, or other computer-controlled typographic keyboard. Standard keybo ...

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 dBase (also stylized dBASE) was one of the first database management systems for microcomputers and the most successful in its day. The dBase system included the core database engine, a query system, a Form (programming), forms engine, and a pr ...

, an early DOS-day database, also copied this keyboard mapping.

References

{{Reflist

External links

TextEditors Wiki: BriefFamily
Windows text editors Borland software DOS text editors