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

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开发者_Go百科 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?

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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.

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I'm not sure about MS programmers (I try to stay far away from them) but there was an emacs lookalike called Epsilon by Lugaru Software. I think I still have the manual and the disk somewhere.

I really don't think this editor "came with" MS C, though. It could be we're talking about very different things. There was an editor that came with MS-DOS that was fullscreen and basically the QBASIC editor without the QBASIC language.

Before that, I used WordStar :)

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I also don't know the answer, but I do recall that in the late 80s we used an editor called PE2, which is functionally and visually similar to Kate, but which was miles ahead of the other editors available at the time. I used it instead of the IDE with Turbo C, but I don't know where it came from. As I recall, it had programmable macros and all kinds of things other editors lacked. Could that be it? I don't recall the brand.

P.S. Dang, it kind of hurts to be an old-timer and not even realize it.

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Are you thinking of Edlin?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edlin

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Was it one of these?

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I came in with QuickC 2.5 (2.54, if memory serves), but I can't recall an alternate editor.

I did use JOVE on DOS (Johnathan's Own Version of EMACS)... think I picked that up in one of those stores that sold shareware for a buck if you brought in your own floppies.