Brief, or the keyboard that other editors had to imitate
Sometime in the late 1980s, several of the most popular DOS development tools — dBASE, Borland C++, among others — quietly added a setting that made them behave like a different editor. Nobody put it in the marketing. You found it buried in a configuration menu or a manual appendix, and once you found it, you understood the compliment. The editor being imitated was Brief. And Brief had not yet been killed.
UnderWare Inc. was founded in Providence, Rhode Island by David Nanian and Michael Strickman, who moved the company to Boston in 1985 — the same year they shipped Brief’s first version through their publisher, Solution Systems. Solution Systems advertised it at $195 under the headline “Program Editing Breakthrough — Get 20% More Done.” The name was a backronym: Basic Reconfigurable Interactive Editing Facility, coined after the fact to suit initials the founders already liked.
The design premise was simple and, for 1985, unusual: every operation had a keyboard binding. There was no menu bar. Opening a file, switching buffers, launching a search, starting a compile — all of it lived on the keyboard, mapped to a layout that fit on the laminated reference card included in the box. Brief’s competitors either had menus or assumed you would return to the command line for anything serious. Brief assumed you would not leave the editor at all.
What made Brief genuinely extensible was its macro language. The first releases used a Lisp-like syntax; later versions added a C-like option. A programmer who wanted Brief to invoke the compiler, capture the error output, and navigate to the first offending line could write exactly that behavior. The customization was not cosmetic — keyboard layout only — but architectural: the editor expected to be extended, and its users developed the habit of extending it.
In 1990, UnderWare sold Brief to Solution Systems, which released version 3.1. Borland International — then at the peak of its influence — bought Brief from Solution Systems the following year, demonstrated a Windows port at Spring Comdex 1991, and then, with the quiet efficiency large companies develop around small acquisitions, discontinued it. The final DOS version shipped in May 1992. The Brief community, which had grown to depend on the editor for daily production work, was not gracious about this.
The keyboard layout, however, refused to retire with the product. Vim, Emacs, Epsilon, and SlickEdit all added Brief emulation modes. Visual Studio shipped with one built in from version 6 through 2008. TextEditors.org catalogs an entire Brief family of clones and emulators, still actively maintained decades later. Across a programming community that treated the vi-versus-Emacs debate as a matter of personal character, Brief’s key bindings were the rare third path that nobody felt strongly enough to argue against.
Brief demonstrated, earlier than most, that a text editor is a platform: something you extend, remap, and script into your workflow rather than accept as shipped. Borland discontinued the executable. The argument it made has been running ever since.
Sources
- Brief — Wikipedia — founders, Providence/Boston timeline, acquisition by Solution Systems and Borland, final version date.
- Brief, the Visual Studio Code from the '80s — Vintage Is The New Old — keyboard-only design, no menus, compiler integration, dBASE and Borland C++ keyboard imitation.
- BriefFamily — TextEditors.org — Brief keyboard layout family, list of emulators and clones across modern editors.