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About Editor Emulation

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The Text editor can emulate two popular text editors: BRIEF and Epsilon. With the emulation feature, the Text editor can emulate the key bindings, text selection, caret display, window display, and most editing commands of the selected editor. Epsilon and BRIEF macro languages are not supported, but Visual C++ includes macro capabilities; see the Automation Overview for more information. If you need shell-like functions, you can hook up cmd.exe or command.com from the Tools menu. For more information, see Customizing the Tools Menu.

The Epsilon emulation is based on the Lugaru Epsilon editor version 6.0, and the BRIEF emulation is based on the Borland BRIEF editor version 3.1.

Note   Each editor emulation includes the use of native syntax for regular expressions during find and replace operations. For more information on regular expression syntax, see Regular Expressions, Regular Expressions with BRIEF Emulation, and Regular Expressions with Epsilon Emulation.

You can use the Compatibility tab in the Options dialog box to set overall editor behavior. Your choice of editor also dictates the regular expression language used throughout the product, wherever regular expression searches are supported. The Compatibility tab contains a drop-down list box of the editors available for emulation. The supported editor emulations are:

  • Visual C++ Developer Studio

  • Visual C++ version 2.0

  • BRIEF

  • Epsilon

The Options checklist contains the compatibility options and their default settings for the chosen editor. You can change these options to create a custom emulation model. When you create a custom emulation model, the word “Custom” appears in the list box with the name of the standard editor. For example, if you change some of the options for the BRIEF emulation, “Custom (BRIEF)” appears in the list.

The following default compatibility options are set for each editor emulation.

For this editor emulation These default options are set
Developer Studio Enable copy without selection.
Visual C++ 2.0 Enable copy without selection.
Enable virtual space.
BRIEF Disable backspace at start of line.
Enable copy without selection.
Enable line-mode pastes.
Enable virtual space.
Include caret positioning in undo buffer.
Use BRIEF’s regular expression syntax.
Epsilon Include caret positioning in undo buffer.

What do you want to do?

Set an editor emulation

Create a custom editor emulation