CodeWright

CodeWright is a Windows Programmers Editing System for software developers originally marketed by Premia Corp. (Beaverton, Oregon) and developed by Premia co-founders Eric Johnson and Don Kinzer, initially released in 1991. Premia was acquired in April 2000 by Starbase Corp. which was itself acquired in January 2003 by Borland.

Contents

• Features
• End of life
• References

CodeWright is considered easy to use by many developers and has powerful extension tools. The program can be configured to work with other integrated development environment (IDE) systems, and synchronize with IDEs on the fly. Support for version control systems, compilers, error files is available. It is possible to extend the editor using DLLs.

CodeWright was a crossover product at a critical time in the history of Windows. The most popular editor for programmers at the time was Brief, a DOS-only product that was considered the essential editor for programmers, due to its split-screen ability and extensive macro capability.

While Windows had extensive word processing capabilities, the kind of block character processing and programmer-oriented features were lacking in Windows editors, which were often considered toys compared to Brief. Since the makers of Brief were not moving to a Windows-based editor, that left it to other parties.

CodeWright was the first Windows editor that offered equivalent or better facilities as Brief, and would even emulate Brief. Additionally, CodeWright arrived at the same time as hardware graphics acceleration was arriving for Windows, removing at a stroke one of the biggest obstacles to the use of Windows, the slow redraw times that made quickly browsing through large code bases difficult or impossible in Windows.

Despite its wide initial popularity, CodeWright would be eclipsed rapidly by a growing number of IDEs available for Windows, which offered similar features as CodeWright, and typically were better integrated to the specific language at hand.