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From: ab2r@quads.uchicago.edu (Marshall Abrams)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.laptops,comp.sys.ibm.pc.misc
Subject: Re: Emacs and Brief
Message-ID: <1991Apr10.200411.15540@midway.uchicago.edu>
Date: 10 Apr 91 20:04:11 GMT
References: <CB.91Apr8152627@tamarack12.timbuk>
Sender: ab2r@midway.uchicago.edu (Marshall Abrams)
Organization: University of Chicago
Lines: 73

In article <CB.91Apr8152627@tamarack12.timbuk> cb@tamarack12.timbuk (Chris Brewster) writes:
>In article <7704@uklirb.informatik.uni-kl.de> steiner@informatik.uni-kl.de 
>
>Donald Steiner writes:
>....  Going by people's comments about other PC Emacs's, I think that they
>would also fail to meet my needs.  But I have heard that the Brief editor is
>fully configurable and extensible, *and* has multi-step UNDO and a lot of power.
>If it's configurable, maybe it could be given an Emacs-like interface.  I'd be
>interested in others' experience with Brief, and opinions about how well it
>could be made to emulate Emacs commands.

I've configured Brief like Emacs--not in any thorough way, but as far
as the basic key mappings.  It's VERY easy to do this in Brief (mostly).
In general, Brief is a very powerful piece of software.  Nice
windowing, especially.  The extension language comes in either C-style
or Lisp-style versions--your choice.  However, I personally prefer a
real Emacs most of the time.  One small thing that I find annoying
about Brief is that treats the whole screen as fair game for cursor
movement, whether there's a character in a particular location or not.
For example, normally, if you're at the end of the line and hit
right-arrow, a few times, you don't end up on the next line, you just
end up a few spaces to the right of where there's any text.  (If you
then insert some text, Brief fills up the space in front of where the
cursor is with spaces or tabs.)  (This is like GNU Emacs' picture mode,
or the free cursor mode on the VMS EVE editor.)  On the plus side, you
CAN map right and left arrow, or ^F and ^B, as you like, to a function
that WILL cause the cursor to wrap at the end of the line.  Fine.
However, as far as I know, there's no easy way to make the analagous
thing happen with the up and down functions.  
I.e. suppose that your cursor is here--> and you want to 
go to the end of *this* line-->
You need to first go down one line (down-arrow, ^N--however you've got
it configured), and THEN call the end-of-line function (END is the
normal key mapping).  OK, I could probably write a macro that did
this right, and I haven't bothered, but I wanted to point out that a
quick remapping doesn't make Brief into Emacs.  (Some may find this
a trifling point, but it's something that annoys me, and probably
others as well.)

The other thing about remapping Brief to make it like Emacs is that
the ESC key has a special status for Brief--it's intimately tied to
the abort function.  There may be a way to put the abort function on
another key, so that ESC can be used as the Meta key, but it's by no
means obvious how this would be done.  I use ALT as if it were Meta.

The last thing that I don't like about Brief is that sometimes have to
use a 4.77 mhz 8088, and it's really slow on that machine.  Some
things are fast enough, but some basic functions, like "next word",
have a noticeable delay.  Obviously the thing wasn't intended to be
used on such a slow machine.  The sluggishness seems to be a result of
the fact that many of brief's built in functions are written in the
macro langage, and the macro language compiler doesn't compile to
binary code--it just tokenizes the source code.  I don't know how
Brief is on a faster 8086; the only other machines I've run Brief on
are 286's and 386's.  Brief is fine on these machines, for most
things.  I once tried to do a column block delete on the entire length
of a 4 meg file, and was about a third of the way through after two
hours.  (A search on the same size file would be done in minutes.)

I should add that I've been using Brief 3.0.  3.1 is out, and I
haven't tried it.

I'm curious about Sage Professional Editor.  Their ads claim to do
everything that Brief does, but faster.  (Well, something like that.)
Anybody know about it.  Also, I'd be interested in opinions about
things that Brief does that are hard to do in Epsilon.

Most importantly, I'd like to know how much like GNU Emacs are the
default key mappings in Epsilon.  (One of the reasons I prefer
Freemacs to MicroEmacs is that I don't have to bother remapping keys
to make Freemacs a lot like GNU.)

		Marshall Abrams