🚀 go-pugleaf

Many thanks to everyone who followed up or emailed me on this
topic, especially Pete.  I think his solution is ideal for
my needs, as soon as I lay my hands on sgrep (Borland's
grep doesn't appear to give exit codes that indicate
whether any matches were found, so I shall need sgrep).

Yes, sure enough, I'm told it's easy with Unix, and indeed
I am currently reconfiguring a 486/25 that I hope eventually
will run either Linux or FreeBSD.  Though why I would use
Unix to do development for DOS escapes me.  Not that I'm
against cross-platform development -- I've done a fair
amount of Unix development using DOS!  (Using ftp over
a lan to xfer the source files).

That comes down to personal taste about editors.  Yes, I've
used vi.  I've even read a book about its many powerful
features.  And it can do a lot more than any free- or share-
ware DOS editor I've seen, even though Qedit is pretty good. I'll
only listen to vi fanatics if they've also given Brief an
extensive trial.  The big problem I see with vi and its brethren
is that they come from an era when editors were designed around
serial connected terminals, not memory mapped displays.  IMO
that's rather limiting, no matter how good the designer is (and
vi's designer did a great job, considering the constraints).  I
paid several hundred dollars for Brief, great great value.  If
only I could have the source code to port it to other systems!

I especially appreciated Pete's solution because it doesn't
rely on the immensely powerful 4DOS.  4DOS is really great,
but I've refused to allow it on my PC because I've seen too
many programmers come to grief.  Out goes a product, and
tucked away somewhere is a .bat file.  Soon afterwards the
tech support lines melt down as users who _don't_ use 4dos
ring and ring and ring.  However, it may be time for me to
abandon that prejudice -- it's well over a year since I
last did any paid work on DOS software and I don't expect
any more.

I couldn't follow the comments about DJGPP.  As I understand
it, this assumes I have the source code for the editor.  This
seems to me to be putting the cart before the horse.  Much as
I'd love to be able to recompile Brief, I don't choose my editors
on the basis of whether or not source code is available unless
other factors are equal.  Where do I find an editor with source
code, that runs fast in DOS, has no significant limits on
file size, can use regular expressions, has its own C-like very
powerful language (also a LISP-like language, but that's no
benefit for me), completely flexible key bindings, can be
configured with a knowledge of the syntax of various languages
(C, Pascal, dBase, etc), comes with a manual about 3" thick (I've
met people with pirate copies of Brief who didn't have a clue how
powerful it is), has lots of extra macros available on the
Internet written by happy users, etc, etc, etc... ?  <yawn>

OK, I don't want to get religious about this.  :-)

However, the comments about DJGPP do serve to heighten my
desire for source of all the tools I use.

So thank you to everyone.  I'm very happy with the responses
I had in this thread, much appreciated.

-- John Washington --