Amen on Slick, now called Visual SlickEdit. It has all the features Brief did including versions for Linux and other operating systems (I think they also had a DOS version which I probably have stacked away somewhere). When Brief was appearing to go by the wayside I switched to SlickEdit and haven't looked back -- great keyboard macros, column cut and paste, multiple windows, global search/replace for projects, text coloring, and on and on . . .
Scott