2006-05-20 Rodrigo Real <rreal@ucpel.tche.br>
[bpt/emacs.git] / etc / TODO
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ba1c68de 1 -*-outline-*-
19cc91fb 2
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3If you are ready to start working on any of these TODO items, we
4appreciate your help; please write to emacs-devel@gnu.org so we can be
5aware that the problem is being addressed, and talk with you how to do
7bea57c9 6it best. Since Emacs is an FSF-copyrighted package, please be
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7prepared to sign legal papers to transfer the copyright on your work
8to the FSF.
9
ba1c68de 10* Small but important fixes needed in existing features:
a9c1a157 11
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12** whitespace-cleanup should work only on the region if the region is active.
13
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14** Distribute a bar cursor of width > 1 evenly between the two glyphs
15 on each side of the bar (what to do at the edges?).
16
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17** Make vc-checkin avoid reverting the buffer if has not changed after
18 the checkin. Comparing (md5 BUFFER) to (md5 FILE) should be enough.
19
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20** buffer-offer-save should be a permanent local.
21
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22** revert-buffer should eliminate overlays and the mark.
23
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24** erase-buffer should perhaps disregard read-only properties of text.
25
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26** Make occur correctly handle matches that span more than one line,
27 as well as overlapping matches.
28
d3a403e5 29** Fix the kill/yank treatment of invisible text. At the moment,
b9e6b498 30 invisible text is placed in the kill-ring, so that the contents of
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31 the ring may not correspond to the text as displayed to the user.
32 It ought to be possible to omit text which is invisible (due to a
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33 text-property, overlay, or selective display) from the kill-ring.
34
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35** Change the way define-minor-mode handles autoloading.
36 It should not generate :require. Or :require in defcustom
37 should not be recorded in the user's custom-set-variables call.
38
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39** The buttons at the top of a custom buffer should not omit
40 variables whose values are currently hidden.
41
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42** Clean up the variables in browse-url. Perhaps use a shell command string to
43 specify the browser instead of the mushrooming set of functions.
44 See also ESR's proposal for a BROWSER environment variable
45 <URL:http://www.catb.org/~esr/BROWSER/browse-url.patch>.
46
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47** Enhance scroll-bar to handle tall line (similar to line-move).
48
49** Make occur handle multi-line matches cleanly with context.
50
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51** In Custom buffers, put the option that turns a mode on or off first,
52 using a heuristic of some kind?
53
54** Define recompute-arg and recompute-arg-if for fix_command to use.
55 See rms message of 11 Dec 05.
56
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57** Height returned by frame-parameter ... and height given to
58 make-frame does not mean the same thing. The former includes menu and
59 tool bar lines, the latter don't. frame-parameter should return height
60 without menu and tool bar lines.
61
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62** In Emacs Info, examples of using Customize should be clickable
63 and they should create Custom buffers.
64
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65** The toolbar should show keyboard equivalents in its tooltips.
66
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67** Modify allout.el to use overlays, like outline.el.
68
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69** M-! M-n should fetch the buffer-file-name as the default.
70
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71** Redesign the load-history data structure so it can cope better
72 with evaluating definitions of the same function from different files,
73 recording which file the latest definition came from.
046ece71 74
ba1c68de 75* Important features:
a9c1a157 76
ba1c68de 77** Provide user-friendly ways to list all available font families,
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78 list fonts, display a font as a sample, etc. [fx is looking at
79 multilingual font selection for the Unicode branch of Emacs.]
5e101746 80
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81** Rewrite the face code to be simpler, clearer and faster.
82
ba1c68de 83** Program Enriched mode to read and save in RTF. [Is there actually a
c51b37fd 84 decent single definition of RTF? Maybe see info at
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85 http://latex2rtf.sourceforge.net/.] This task seems to be addressed
86 by http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/emacs-rtf/, which is still in
87 very early stages.
6165b6e3 88
ba1c68de 89** Implement something better than the current Refill mode. This
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90 probably needs some primitive support.
91
ba6be78d 92** Add a command to make a "Local Variables" section in the current buffer
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93 and/or add a variable to the list.
94
ba1c68de 95** Implement primitive and higher-level functions to allow filling
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96 properly with variable-pitch faces.
97
ba1c68de 98** Implement a smoother vertical scroll facility, one that allows
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99 C-v to scroll through a tall image. The primitive operations
100 posn-at-point and posn-at-x-y should now make it doable in elisp.
a9c1a157 101
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102** Implement intelligent search/replace, going beyond query-replace
103 (see http://graphics.csail.mit.edu/~rcm/chi04.pdf).
104
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105** Implement other text formatting properties.
106*** Footnotes that can appear either in place or at the end of the page.
107*** text property that says "don't break line in middle of this".
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108 Don't break the line between two characters that have the
109 same value of this property.
ba1c68de 110*** Discretionary hyphens that are not visible when they are at end of line.
6165b6e3 111
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112** Internationalize Emacs's messages.
113
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114** Install mmc@maruska.dyndns.org's no-flicker change.
115
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116** Add a "current vertical pixel level" value that goes with point,
117 so that motion commands can also move through tall images.
118 This value would be to point as window-vscroll is to window-start.
119
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120** Address internationalization of symbols names essentially
121 as documentation, e.g. in command names and Custom.
a9c1a157 122
ba1c68de 123** Make the Lucid menu widget display multilingual text. [This
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124 probably needs to be done from actual Emacs buffers, either directly
125 in the menu or by rendering in an unmapped window and copying the
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126 pixels. The current code assumes a specific locale; that isn't good
127 enough even if X can render the arbitrary text] [The gtk
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128 port now displays multilingual text in menus, but only insofar as
129 Emacs can encode it as utf-8 and gtk can display the result.]
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130 Maybe making Lucid menus work like Gtk's (i.e. just force utf-8) is good
131 enough now that Emacs can encode most chars into utf-8.
a9c1a157 132
ba1c68de 133** Remove the limitation that window and frame widths and heights can
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134 be only full columns/lines.
135
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136* Other features we would like:
137
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138** Remove the default toggling behavior of minor modes when called from elisp
139rather than interactively. This a trivial one-liner in easy-mode.el.
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140** Create a category of errors called `user-error' for errors which are
141typically due to pilot errors and should thus be in debug-ignored-errors.
142
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143** Give Tar mode all the features of Archive mode.
144
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145** Create a category of errors called `process-error'
146 for some or all errors associated with using subprocesses.
147
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148** Maybe reinterpret `parse-error' as a category of errors
149 and put some other errors under it.
150
1a500a73 151** A function to tell you the argument pattern of functions.
1b2105d9 152 See `function-arity' in http://www.loveshack.ukfsn.org/emacs/fx-misc.el.
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153
154** Make byte-compile warn when a doc string is too wide.
155
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156** A function to check for customizable options that have been
157 set but not saved, and ask the user whether to save them.
158 This could go in kill-emacs-query-functions, to remind people
159 to save their changes. If the user says yes, show them
160 in a Custom buffer using customize-customized.
161
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162** Emacs Lisp mode could put an overlay on the defun for every
163 function that has advice. The overlay could have `after-text' like "
164 [Function has advice]". It might look like
046ece71 165 (defun foo [Function has advice] (x y)
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166 The overlay could also be a button that you could use to view the advice.
167
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168** ange-ftp
169*** understand sftp
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170 This is hard to make work because sftp doesn't print status
171 messages.
172
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173*** Use MLS for ange-ftp-insert-directory if a list of files is specified.
174
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175** Ability to map a key, including all modified-combinations.
176 E.g map mouse-4 to wheel-up as well as M-mouse-4 -> M-wheel-up
177 M-C-mouse-4 -> M-C-wheel-up, H-S-C-M-s-double-mouse-4 ->
178 H-S-C-M-s-double-wheel-up, ...
a9c1a157 179
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180** Beefed-up syntax-tables.
181*** recognize multi-character syntactic entities like `begin' and `end'.
182*** nested string-delimiters (for Postscript's (foo(bar)baz) strings).
183*** support for infix operators (with precedence).
184*** support for the $ (paired delimiter) in parse-partial-sexp.
185*** support for hook-chars whose effect on the parsing-state is specified
186 by elisp code. Thus a char could both close a string and open a comment
187 at the same time and do it in a context-sensitive way.
188*** ability to add mode-specific data to the partial-parse-state.
189
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190** Add a way to convert a keyboard macro to equivalent Lisp code.
191
ba1c68de 192** Have a command suggestion help system that recognizes patterns
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193 of commands which could be replaced with a simpler common command.
194 It should not make more than one suggestion per 10 minutes.
6165b6e3 195
ba1c68de 196** Add a way to define input methods by computing them (when first used)
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197 from other input methods. Then redefine C-x 8 to use a
198 user-selected input method, with the default being the union of
199 latin-1-prefix and latin-1-postfix.
200
ba1c68de 201** Implement a clean way to use different major modes for
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202 different parts of a buffer. This could be useful in editing
203 Bison input files, for instance, or other kinds of text
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204 where one language is embedded in another language. See
205 http://www.loveshack.ukfsn.org/emacs/multi-mode.el and also
206 mmm-mode, as reference for approaches took by others.
a933dad1 207
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208** Arrange a way for an input method to return the first character
209 immediately, then replace it later. So that C-s a with
210 input method latin-1-postfix would immediately search for an a.
211
ba1c68de 212** Give start-process the ability to direct standard-error
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213 output to a different filter.
214
ba1c68de 215** Make desktop.el save the "frame configuration" of Emacs (in some
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216 useful sense).
217
ba1c68de 218** Give desktop.el a feature to switch between different named
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219 desktops.
220
ba1c68de 221** Replace finder.el with something that generates an Info file
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222 which gives the same information through a menu structure. [Dave
223 Love started on this.]
a933dad1 224
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225** Add a cpio mode, more or less like tar mode.
226
ba1c68de 227** Implement a variant of uncompress.el or jka-compr.el that works with
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228 GNU Privacy Guard for encryption. [Code exists but isn't assigned.
229 See the Gnus development sources for assigned code concerning GPG
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230 use with mail, which is probably a good start.] See also
231 http://www.loveshack.ukfsn.org/emacs/auto-crypt.tgz.
a933dad1 232
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233** Save undo information in special temporary files, and reload it
234 when needed for undoing. This could extend undo capacity.
a933dad1 235
ba1c68de 236** Change the Windows NT menu code
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237 so that it handles the deep_p argument and avoids
238 regenerating the whole menu bar menu tree except
239 when the user tries to use the menubar.
240
241 This requires the RIT to forward the WM_INITMENU message to
242 the main thread, and not return from that message until the main
0245b3ef 243 thread has processed the MENU_BAR_ACTIVATE_EVENT and regenerated
a933dad1 244 the whole menu bar. In the mean time, it should process other messages.
d054101f 245
ba1c68de 246** Get some major packages installed: W3 (development version needs
2794f7ab 247 significant work), PSGML. Check the assignments file for other
a52ce7f8 248 packages which might go in and have been missed.
e39fc314 249
ba1c68de 250** Make keymaps a first-class Lisp object (this means a rewrite of
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251 keymap.c). What should it do apart from being opaque ?
252 multiple inheritance ? faster where-is ? no more fix_submap_inheritance ?
253 what else ?
e39fc314 254
ba1c68de 255** Provide real menus on ttys. The MS-DOS implementation can serve as
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256 an example how to do part of this.
257
ba1c68de 258** Implement popular parts of the rest of the CL functions as compiler
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259 macros in cl-macs.
260
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261** Make compiler warnings about functions that might be undefined at run time
262 smarter, so that they know which files are required by the file being
263 compiled and don't warn about functions defined in them.
264
ba1c68de 265** Highlight rectangles (`mouse-track-rectangle-p' in XEmacs). Already in CUA,
a52ce7f8 266 but it's a valuable feature worth making more general.
e39fc314 267
046ece71 268** Support simultaneous tty and X frames. [See the multi-tty branch of Emacs
4e8b322f 269 at http://lorentey.hu/project/emacs.]
e39fc314 270
ba1c68de 271** Provide MIME support for Rmail using the Gnus MIME library. [Maybe
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272 not now feasible, given Gnus maintenance decisions. fx looked at
273 this and can say where some of the problems are.]
e39fc314 274
ba1c68de 275** Eliminate the storm of warnings concerning char/unsigned char
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276 mismatches that we get with GCC 4.x and proprietary compilers on
277 various systems. They make it difficult to spot the important
278 warnings.
e39fc314 279
ba1c68de 280** Fix anything necessary to use `long long' EMACS_INTs with GCC.
eaf67bae 281
ba1c68de 282** Split out parts of lisp.h and generate Makefile dependencies
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283 automatically.
284
ba1c68de 285** Update the FAQ.
eaf67bae 286
ba1c68de 287** Allow auto-compression-mode to use zlib calls if zlib is available.
b04f7626 288 [It's required for PNG, so may be linked anyhow.]
1265b539 289
ba1c68de 290** Add a --pristine startup flag which does -q --no-site-file plus
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291 ignoring X resources (Doze equivalents?) and most of the
292 environment. What should not be ignored needs consideration.
293
ba1c68de 294** Improve the GC (generational, incremental). (We may be able to use
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295 the Boehm collector.) [See the Boehm-GC branch in CVS for work on
296 this.]
19cc91fb 297
ba1c68de 298** Check what hooks would help Emacspeak -- see the defadvising in W3.
e2849090 299
ba1c68de 300** Add horizontal scroll bars.
00a18b59 301
ba1c68de 302** Provide an optional feature which computes a scroll bar slider's
e4ded23c 303 size and its position from lines instead of characters.
c0460c17 304
ba1c68de 305** Add support for SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) rendering to
296808a5 306 Emacs.
6add099c 307
ba1c68de 308** Allow unknown image types to be rendered via an external program
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309 converting them to, say, PBM (in the same way as PostScript?).
310
ba1c68de 311** Allow displaying an X window from an external program in a buffer,
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312 e.g. to render graphics from Java applets. [gerd and/or wmperry
313 thought this was feasible.]
314
ba1c68de 315** Allow images (not just text) in the margin to be mouse-sensitive.
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316 (Requires recursing through display properties). Provide some way
317 to simulate mouse-clicks on marginal text without a mouse.
318
ba1c68de 319** Implement Lisp functions to determine properly whether a character
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320 is displayable (particularly needed in XFree 4, sigh). Use it to
321 define useful glyphs that may be displayed as images or unicodes
322 (with ASCIIfied fallback via latin1-disp). Examples include
323 box-drawing graphics in Custom buffers, W3 rules and tables, and
324 tree displays generally, mode-line mail indicator. [See work done
325 already for Emacs 22 and consult fx.]
326
ba1c68de 327** Do something to make rms happy with fx's dynamic loading, and use it
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328 to implement things like auto-loaded buffer parsers and database
329 access in cases which need more than Lisp.
330
ba1c68de 331** Extend ps-print to deal with multiple font sizes, images, and extra
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332 encodings.
333
ba1c68de 334** Provide portable undumping using mmap (per gerd design).
d1c3f6b6 335
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336** Make byte-compile avoid binding an expanded defsubst's args
337when the body only calls primitives.
338
ba1c68de 339** Use the XIE X extension, if available, for image display.
e641b454 340
ba1c68de 341** Make monochrome images display using the foreground and background
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342 colors of the applicable faces.
343
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344** Face remapping.
345
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346** Optionally make the cursor a little thinner at the end of a line
347 or the end of the buffer.
348
ba1c68de 349** Add support for rendering antialiased text, probably using
2a573e69 350 XRender/Freetype.
c5020b5b 351
ba1c68de 352** Port the conservative stack marking code of Emacs' garbage collector
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353 to more systems, so that we can completely get rid of GCPROs. Note
354 that Boehm garbage collector provides this.
5e101746 355
ba1c68de 356** Reorder defcustom's in each package so that the more important
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357 options come first in the Customize buffers. This could be done by
358 either rearranging the file (since options are shown in the order
359 they appear in the *.el files), or by adding a few :set-after
360 attributes.
361
ba1c68de 362** Maybe document the features of libraries missing from the manual (or
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363 ancillary manuals, including the Lisp manual in some cases).
364 This is not worth doing for all of these packages and we need not
365 aim for completeness, but some may be worth documenting.
366
367 Here's a list which is probably not complete/correct: align, allout,
368 artist, ansi-color, array, battery, calculator, cdl, cmuscheme,
657c5358 369 completion, cua, delim-col, dirtrack, double, echistory, elide-head,
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370 easymenu, expand, flow-ctrl, format [format-alist],
371 generic/generic-x [various modes], kermit, log-edit, ledit
372 [obsolete?], makesum, midnight [other than in Kill Buffer node],
373 mouse-copy [?], mouse-drag, mouse-sel, net-utils, rcompile,
374 snmp-mode [?], soundex [should be interactive?], strokes [start from
375 the web page], talk, thingatpt [interactive functions?], type-break,
376 vcursor, xscheme, zone-mode [?], mlconvert [?], iso-cvt, iso-swed,
377 swedish, feedmail [?], uce, bruce, gametree, meese, page-ext,
378 refbib, refer, scribe, sgml-mode, spell, texinfo, underline,
379 cmacexp, hideif, mantemp [obsolete?], pcomplete, assoc, xml,
380 cvs-status (should be described in PCL-CVS manual); other progmodes,
381 probably in separate manual.
758830ba 382
ba1c68de 383** Convert the XPM bitmaps to PPM, replace the PBMs with them and scrap
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384 the XPMs so that the colour versions work generally. (Requires care
385 with the colour used for the transparent regions.)
386
ba1c68de 387** Convenient access to the `values' variable. It would be nice to have an
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388 interface that would show you the printed reps of the elements of the
389 list in a menu, let you select one of the values, and put it into some
390 other variable, without changing the value of `values'.
bf6394a6 391
ba1c68de 392** (Controlled by a flag) make open and close syntax match exactly,
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393 i.e. `(' doesn't match `]'.
394
ba1c68de 395** Specify parameter ID-FORMAT in all calls to `file-attributes' and
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396 `directory-files-and-attributes' where attributes UID or GID are used.
397 Whenever possible, use value 'string.
398 When done, change meaning of default value from 'integer to 'string.
399 If value 'integer is used nowhere, remove the parameter ID-FORMAT from
400 the definition of `file-attributes' and `directory-files-and-attributes'
401 and from the calls.
402
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403** Make language-info-alist customizable. Currently a user can customize
404 only the variable `current-language-environment'.
405
406** Improve language environment handling so that Emacs can fit
407 better to a users locale. Currently Emacs uses utf-8 language
408 environment for all utf-8 locales, thus a user in ja_JP.UTF-8 locale
409 are also put in utf-8 lang. env. In such a case, it is
410 better to use Japanese lang. env. but prefer utf-8 coding system.
1f724d55 411
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412** Enhance locale handling: handle language, territory and charset
413 orthogonally and de-emphasize language environments. Use the locale
414 to set up more things, such as fontsets, the default Ispell
415 dictionary, diary format, calendar holidays and display, quoting
416 characters and phrase boundaries, sentence endings, collation for
417 sorting (at least for unicodes), HTTP Accept-language, patterns for
418 directory listings and compilation messages, yes-or-no replies,
419 common menu items when the toolkit supports it ... `locale-info'
420 needs extending for LC_COLLATE &c. [fx started on this.]
421
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422** Eliminate the current restriction on header printing by ps-print.
423 Currently, a header can contain only single 1-byte charset in
424 addition to ASCII.
425
426** In ps-print, provide an user friendly interface to specify fonts.
427
428** OpenType font support for various complex scripts (e.g. Devanagari).
429 As X protocal doesn't provide a way to access OpenType Layout Tables
430 in a OpenType font of a server side, we need a way to utilize local
431 fonts (perhaps by directly using the Freetype library or indirectly
432 via Xft library).
433
434** Enhance word boundary detection for such a script that doesn't use
435 space at word boundary (e.g. Thai).
436
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437** Implement interface programs with major Japanese conversion server
438 in lib-src so that they can be used from the input method
439 "japanese". Currently, most Japanese users are using external
440 packages (e.g. tamago, anthy) or an input method via XIM.
1f724d55 441
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442** Let LEIM handle the Mode_switch key like XIM does (i.e. a toggle like C-\
443but which can also be used as a modifier).
444
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445** Provide the toolbar on ttys. This could map a bit like tmm-menubar
446 for the menubar and buttons could look a bit like those used by customize.
447
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448** Improve Help buffers: Change the face of previously visited links (like
449 Info, but also with regard to namespace), add a forward button to make the
450 Help buffer more browser like and gives the value of lisp expressions
451 e.g auto-mode-alist, the right face. [nickrob@snap.net.nz has a patch
452 for this for inclusion after 22.1].
453
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454** Possibly make `list-holidays' eval items in the calendar-holidays variable.
455 See thread
456 <http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2006-02/msg01034.html>.
457 [rgm@gnu.org will look at this after 22.1]
458
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459* Internal changes
460
461** Replace gmalloc.c with the modified Doug Lea code from the current
462 GNU libc so that the special mmapping of buffers can be removed --
5a473319 463 that apparently loses under Solaris, at least. [fx has mostly done
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464 this.]
465
466** Rewrite make-docfile to be clean and maintainable.
467
468** Add an inferior-comint-minor-mode to capture the common set of operations
469 offered by major modes that offer an associated inferior
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470 comint-derived mode. I.e. basically make cmuscheme.el/inf-lisp.el generic.
471 For use by sml-mode, python-mode, tex-mode, scheme-mode, lisp-mode,
472 haskell-mode, tuareg-mode, ...
ba1c68de 473
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474** Make SYNC_INPUT the default.
475 All loops using immediate_quit need to be checked to ensure that
476 C-g can interrupt them, in case of an infinite loop. Once we
477 switch to using SYNC_INPUT, we can remove the BLOCK_INPUTs in the
478 allocation functions (allocate_string etc.) without worrying about
479 data munging.
480
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481* Other known bugs:
482
483** a two-char comment-starter whose two chars are symbol constituents will
484not be noticed if it appears within a word.
485
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486** Fix unexelf.c to handle the .data.rel and .data.rel.local
487 sections made by GCC 3.4 on IRIX.
488
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