In 1990, I was using the BRIEF editor on MS-DOS, which was an editor for programmers and which was quite similar to Emacs (also including a scripting language somewhat similar to LISP). BRIEF must have already existed for some years.
It had a completely configurable auto-complete, which I rewrote to insert big code templates in the languages that I was using (C, C++, Fortran, Basic, assembly), covering almost all boilerplate that I encountered at that time.
The BRIEF editor for programmers was one of the best software products that I have ever used. Nothing that I encountered later on Windows approached it in customizability. Actually I find it strange that I cannot recall any Windows program that I would consider as a high-quality software product, while there are a handful of programs for MS-DOS that I consider as examples of high-quality, even decades later (e.g. the programming editor BRIEF, the file manager XTree, the spreadsheet Lotus 1-2-3, the technical drawing program AutoCAD for MS-DOS; all these were extremely customizable).
Nowadays Emacs may have even more customizable features, but it has always been more opaque for newbies. BRIEF was instantly usable on an IBM PC clone, even if discovering its advanced features could require some time.
Despite having used continuously for 3 decades various UNIX-derived operating systems, including Solaris, FreeBSD and Linux, only this year I have switched to Emacs, in order to recreate the great programming experience that I had with BRIEF many years ago. Emacs includes all that is necessary, but it requires a much longer initial study in comparison with BRIEF, before becoming able to master it, which is why I hesitated for a long time before trying it.
I started a job (moving cities for this new job) in 2004 and found my boss (at that time, a grizzled old veteran of computing) using BRIEF.
I recall him trying to convince me to switch to it a few times, from vim. I never found it as advanced as vim, but I could see the capabilities. I recall being impressed by some macro he had that improved navigation, both within a file and opening new files.
I also recall him being impressed when I showed him vim's ctags commands.
Out-of-the-box, BRIEF was not especially impressive.
Its strength was its embedded scripting language, which may have been inspired by Emacs LISP.
With the scripting language, you could change everything, including the behavior of any key press or of any combination of keys.
Thus you could create a personalized editor that had no resemblance with BRIEF as originally delivered and you could parse the source text of the edited programs and do arbitrary transformations or analyses and you could invoke any external tools for building a software project and it handled the compiling error messages, so it could work as a complete IDE. It also included a tiled windows manager.
Therefore, it is likely that there have been as many different BRIEF editors as BRIEF users, as long as they hacked the set of scripts originally delivered with it.
The only editor that I am aware of and which has a so powerful scripting language is Emacs and its derivatives. Because Emacs is even older than BRIEF, I assume that it was the source of inspiration for BRIEF. I have used vim for many years. I was satisfied with it, but it was not so easy to customize as BRIEF was.
Looking now at the corresponding Wikipedia page, I see that actually there have already been created a few clones, both for Windows and for Linux.
I have not used BRIEF for Windows, so I do not know if it was as good as BRIEF for MS-DOS. Unfortunately, most of the great MS-DOS programs had versions ported to Windows that were quite disappointing.
This allowed Microsoft to create competitive Windows products that grabbed the market from the former MS-DOS market leaders, like with Microsoft Office. Of course, Microsoft cheated in many cases, because its internal developers frequently used Windows OS interfaces that were not yet known to outsiders because they were planned for the next Windows release or interfaces that were undocumented and which remained undocumented, unless someone reverse engineered them.
Which is why when being on UNIX, and having only vi, Emacs and XEmacs available, with basic tools like ctags, unless being lucky to work at some place paying for really expensive UNIX IDEs felt like a downgrade for folks raised in Amiga/PC world.
It had a completely configurable auto-complete, which I rewrote to insert big code templates in the languages that I was using (C, C++, Fortran, Basic, assembly), covering almost all boilerplate that I encountered at that time.
The BRIEF editor for programmers was one of the best software products that I have ever used. Nothing that I encountered later on Windows approached it in customizability. Actually I find it strange that I cannot recall any Windows program that I would consider as a high-quality software product, while there are a handful of programs for MS-DOS that I consider as examples of high-quality, even decades later (e.g. the programming editor BRIEF, the file manager XTree, the spreadsheet Lotus 1-2-3, the technical drawing program AutoCAD for MS-DOS; all these were extremely customizable).
Nowadays Emacs may have even more customizable features, but it has always been more opaque for newbies. BRIEF was instantly usable on an IBM PC clone, even if discovering its advanced features could require some time.
Despite having used continuously for 3 decades various UNIX-derived operating systems, including Solaris, FreeBSD and Linux, only this year I have switched to Emacs, in order to recreate the great programming experience that I had with BRIEF many years ago. Emacs includes all that is necessary, but it requires a much longer initial study in comparison with BRIEF, before becoming able to master it, which is why I hesitated for a long time before trying it.