Oldtimers: What was the emacs-like editor that came with MS C 5.0 (for DOS) in the late 1980s?

Question

I bought MS C 5.0 after first getting QuickC 1.0 (I think because there was some limitation with QuickC that the full-blown C 5.0 didn't have, but I can't recall the details now). This was the summer of 1988 I believe. Anyway, there was an editor buried somewhere on the discs which wasn't the default editor. I can't remember the name of the editor, and web searching hasn't turned up anything. This editor wasn't documented in the printed manuals, but it did have detailed help. In the help docs, it was claimed that this was the editor MS programmers actually used internally at the time.

Compared to the QuickC editor, this one was very esoteric. I remember it had "meta" keys, programmable macros, and lots of stuff my newborn programmer brain found fascinating. I don't think it used lisp for the extension language, but that part of it was way over my head so for all I know it could have. Years later, after I discovered Linux and then emacs, I thought there were some striking similarities between that old MS "programmer's editor" and emacs, but by then it had been a few years since I had used MS C and didn't even have the floppies anymore. But something recently made me remember those early programming days of mine, and I had a clear memory of this editor, probably the first time I've thought about it in over 15 years. I can't seem to find anything online about it.

If anyone does remember this editor, was it just another case of MS borrowing ideas from someone else (I assume that the emacs source code was available in 1988, so "borrowing" would've been fairly easy), or were the similarities just a coincidence, if I even remember those similarities correctly?

And, for anyone that worked as a programmer for MS in the late 80s, was it really the editor MS programmers used in-house?

Answer 1

One of the best programmer's editors from that period was "Brief" which implemented a lot of Emacs functionality. It was certainly used by some MS programmers, but I don't think MS ever shipped it.