[adrian_b]

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.