From: yogi@cs.ubc.ca (Yossi Gil)
Subject: Re: Recommendation on editor for C / Brief only $99 now
Organization: Computer Science, University of B.C., Vancouver, B.C., Canada
Date: Sun, 6 Sep 92 19:54:12 GMT

levin@world.std.com (Levin F Magruder) writes:

>I know/think there's a editors group, but in my opinion this
>is a msdos question.  Flame by mail, if necessary.  Thanks.

I agree with Levin. This is a good group (flame me to if you will),
but why not put comp.editors in the Newsgroups list? I have corrected
that. 

>The only programming I do is in C.  What I'd really like is
>an emacs clone that works right, but I've given up on DEMACS.
>I would keep trying with DEMACS if it ran right under DesqView,
>but it still doesn't, right?

Epsilon!

>I've tried qedit, and don't like it.  The version I tried is
>about three years old, does anyone think much of it, if it's
>changed much since?  (As I recall, you couldn't even write a
>macro that would, say, ask for a string at the time of running
>the macro, search for that string and do something.)

The latest version is 2.15 or so. Not much change in recent years.

>I tried an editor call PE (perfect editor, shareware) and 
>dislike it.  Same problem with macros, and it's irritating in
>how it handles the ring of loaded files.  I'm forever accidentally
>renaming files and quitting files.

>Brief is on sale from Borland now.  I'd still rather not spend
>the $99, but if it's as good as its reputed to be, I guess
>I'd take the plunge.  

Can you elaborate? Borland took over Brief?

>My main criteria is that it can automatically handle braces, etc.
>(You'd think that would be simple enough, but I've never been
>pleased with the way any editor does it...) and have a quick to
>learn and flexible macro language.  And work under Desqview.

Brief can do that, but it not as neat or efficient as epsilon in
terms of macros.  Still, brief is much more natural and easy to use
than epsilon.

>Those of you who use brief, does it meet these criteria?  Other
>suggestions are welcome, bearing in mind that I begrudge even
>$99 expense.  I am not a professional programmer, I write little
>filters and things like that.

SHAMELESS ADVERTISING: For quick and dirty jobs you may want to take
a look at my editors (TERSE and SLIM) which use ideas from brief,
but don't have so much features (after all, how many features can
you put in a 4-5 KB editor) and are only $15 to register.

>An example of how I write follows.  I think it's pretty standard
>and auto formatting should be able to indulge my preferences...

>int proc(char *arg)
>{
>  char localc ;
>  char *cp ;

>  while(*cp != arg)
>  {
>    dothis(*cp) ;
>    getanother(cp) ;
>    eflag = estat(*cp) ;
>   }
>  
>   return(something) ;
>}

>I would like to be able to make it autoexpand ); to ) ; and
>}\n to }\n\n if the first non-white char after } \n is not }.

Brief can most probably do that, but since I completely disagree
with your indentation style ;-) I will never try to coerce it to
do the above. 

>Thanks for suggestions.
--
Joseph (Yossi) Gil                 {alberta,uw-beaver,uunet}!ubc-cs!yogi
Dept. of Computer Science          yogi@cs.ubc.ca (cs.ubc.ca=137.82.8.5)
6356 Agricultural Road., Univ. of B.C.,             Tel: +1-604-822-8175
Vancouver, British Columbia, V6T 1Z2, Canada.       Fax: +1-604-822-5485