Brief Mode — fully functional Brief simulation for Emacs.
Once upon a time, Brief domain the DOS editing world. Almost every text editor has "Brief compatible" mode that simulate the Brief behavior & keyboard binding. Emacs too has Brief simulation, long time ago. There are two of them actually. But both were not satisfaction. So, I hacked a version of my own.
My version is more than a Brief simulator; it comes with all handy features I found on the web and in the news groups (I hacked them in with original author name preserved). My Brief simulation is not an official release. I'm publishing it in hoping that somebody can save some time that I've spent.
Since I'm not a Lisp programmer at all, I can't support it with feature requests. Suggestions and patches are always welcome.
Please visit the xpt tools support page.
> > For those of you still prefer the Brief(TM) keybinding, here is my > > hacked brief-mode! I just wrapped it up and put it on the web. > > > > One file only. All documentation is in the code. Have a look at it > > and you'll find it is more than a brief-mode, it is my over 2 years > > of collection of emacs-lisp functions in one file... > > How is it different from crisp-mode, available with latest Emacsen?
I had looked into the crisp-mode while I was looking for a brief mode. I was not impressed by the simple functions it provided, it was almost two years ago though.
The brief mode that I hacked was a fully functional brief simulation, from the behavior of home/end, block marking and handling, search/replace, to bookmarking, keyboard macro record/playback/save/restore, and even to session history/ windows handling… again, totally simulate what brief does, well, with a very few exceptions documented in the code.
What I enhanced was just things here and there, For example, delete the next/previous word. It's brief behavior, not emacs behavior. Look into the code you'll see that brief is always trying to be smarter, doing many "if in this condition, I'll do this, and if in the other condition I'll do that" in a single key. Emacs tends to assign different keybindings to different tasks, even though they are similar. Brief's block marking and handling is also a great example. The benefit? I don't need to remember so many keybindings and all the brief keybindings are just single key press, not double keys or even triple keys.
I also threw in many my personal enhancements. For example, WS keybindings and menu access for tty mode or Notepads that don't have standard num-keypads. Insert date/time/filename, word/region case handling, and so on.
documented on: 2000.04.27
Put the 'brief-mode.el' file into your Emacs' load-path.
Add something like the following to your .emacs file
;; == Brief Mode (load "brief-mode")