GNU ELPA - brief

The Brief editor v3.1 was once very popular among programmers in the MS-DOS days. It is famous for its easy-to-learn. Most of the command 'K'eys are associated with meaningful 'K'eywords. Usually, it can be mastered within an hour and difficult to forget.

For example, the first <home> key bring the cursor to home (beginning) of current line, a consecutive second <home> key to the home (beginning) of the window and a third <home> to the home (beginning) of the file. Similarly for the <end> key. To paste/insert clipboard contents into current file just press <insert>,… and so on.

Personally, I've been using this key combination for over 32+ years (by the time Y2023 this guide was updated) and have never changed, since the beginning of the MS-DOS Brief Editor days; the later 22+ years of the 32 are using Emacs with this Brief Mode.

[Actually, after 22+ years of Emacs I still can't (or simply, don't need to) memorize the default Emacs keys, except for <Ctrl>-g (cancel half-entered commands) and <Ctrl>-x <Ctrl>-c (quit Emacs, in case I don't have my Brief mode at hand, yet).]

There are some less favored default Emacs settings which makes the editing experience in Emacs quite unlike others, especially for programmers. For example, text wrapping is by default enabled so a program line could easily wrapped to next line if window size changed; text scrolling is jumppy in both horizontal and vertical directions and on <page up> / <page down> the cursor does not stay at the same position. Some of these behaviors can be easily adjusted by changing default settings.

With the quick launcher 'b' all these are fixed. The <page up> / <page down> are rewritten in Brief while function `brief-easy-start' changed other settings then do `(brief-mode 1)' to enable Brief mode.

If you launch Emacs without using quick launcher 'b' or `brief-easy-start' function, you may want to include those changes into your ~/.emacs init script:

;;--------------------------------------------------------------------------;
(setq-default truncate-lines t)  ;; disable line wrapping                   ;
;;(setq-default global-visual-line-mode t)                                  ;
(setq scroll-step 1              ;; set vertical scroll not jumppy          ;
      scroll-conservatively 101)                                            ;
(setq hscroll-margin 1           ;; set horizontal scroll not jumppy        ;
      hscroll-step 1)                                                       ;
(scroll-bar-mode -1)             ;; small border without scroll bar         ;
;;--------------------------------------------------------------------------;

Or you can refer to the source code "brief.el" for function `brief-easy-start'.

For more details like Cygwin 2.x users note, please check the comments in the source code "brief.el".

Luke Lee