| 1 | -*-outline-*- |
| 2 | |
| 3 | If you are ready to start working on any of these TODO items, we |
| 4 | appreciate your help; please write to emacs-devel@gnu.org so we can be |
| 5 | aware that the problem is being addressed, and talk with you how to do |
| 6 | it best. Since Emacs is an FSF-copyrighted package, please be |
| 7 | prepared to sign legal papers to transfer the copyright on your work |
| 8 | to the FSF. |
| 9 | |
| 10 | * Small but important fixes needed in existing features: |
| 11 | |
| 12 | ** Fix the kill/yank treatment of invisible text. At the moment, |
| 13 | invisible text is placed in the kill-ring, so that the contents of |
| 14 | the ring may not correspond to the text as displayed to the user. It |
| 15 | ought to be possible to omit text which is invisible (due to a |
| 16 | text-property, overlay, or selective display) from the kill-ring. |
| 17 | |
| 18 | ** Redefine define-generic-mode as a macro, so the compiler |
| 19 | sees the definitions it generates. |
| 20 | |
| 21 | ** Change the way define-minor-mode handles autoloading. |
| 22 | It should not generate :require. Or :require in defcustom |
| 23 | should not be recorded in the user's custom-set-variables call. |
| 24 | |
| 25 | ** The buttons at the top of a custom buffer should not omit |
| 26 | variables whose values are currently hidden. |
| 27 | |
| 28 | * Important features: |
| 29 | |
| 30 | ** Provide user-friendly ways to list all available font families, |
| 31 | display a font as a sample, etc. [fx is looking at multilingual |
| 32 | font selection for Emacs 22.] |
| 33 | |
| 34 | ** Program Enriched mode to read and save in RTF. [Is there actually a |
| 35 | decent single definition of RTF? Maybe see info at |
| 36 | http://latex2rtf.sourceforge.net/.] |
| 37 | |
| 38 | ** Implement something better than the current Refill mode. This |
| 39 | probably needs some primitive support. |
| 40 | |
| 41 | ** Implement primitive and higher-level functions to allow filling |
| 42 | properly with variable-pitch faces. |
| 43 | |
| 44 | ** Implement a smoother vertical scroll facility, one that allows |
| 45 | C-v to scroll through a tall image. The primitive operations |
| 46 | posn-at-point and posn-at-x-y should now make it doable in elisp. |
| 47 | |
| 48 | ** Implement intelligent search/replace, going beyond query-replace |
| 49 | (see http://graphics.csail.mit.edu/~rcm/chi04.pdf). |
| 50 | |
| 51 | ** Implement other text formatting properties. |
| 52 | *** Footnotes that can appear either in place or at the end of the page. |
| 53 | *** text property that says "don't break line in middle of this". |
| 54 | Don't break the line between two characters that have the |
| 55 | same value of this property. |
| 56 | *** Discretionary hyphens that are not visible when they are at end of line. |
| 57 | |
| 58 | ** Make movemail work with IMAP. |
| 59 | |
| 60 | ** Internationalize Emacs's messages. [Note that this is of limited |
| 61 | use until the menus can display multilingual text. It also doesn't |
| 62 | address important issues like using the names of symbols essentially |
| 63 | as documentation, e.g. in command names and Custom. -- fx] |
| 64 | |
| 65 | ** Make the Lucid menu widget display multilingual text. [This |
| 66 | probably needs to be done from actual Emacs buffers, either directly |
| 67 | in the menu or by rendering in an unmapped window and copying the |
| 68 | pixels. Note that the relevant Xlib functions assume a specific |
| 69 | locale; that isn't good enough even if X can render the arbitrary |
| 70 | text, which it often can't as far as I can tell. -- fx] [The gtk |
| 71 | port now displays multilingual text in menus, but only insofar as |
| 72 | Emacs can encode it as utf-8 and gtk can display the result.] |
| 73 | |
| 74 | ** Remove the limitation that window and frame widths and heights can |
| 75 | be only full columns/lines. |
| 76 | |
| 77 | * Other features we would like: |
| 78 | |
| 79 | ** A function to check for customizable options that have been |
| 80 | set but not saved, and ask the user whether to save them. |
| 81 | This could go in kill-emacs-query-functions, to remind people |
| 82 | to save their changes. If the user says yes, show them |
| 83 | in a Custom buffer using customize-customized. |
| 84 | |
| 85 | ** Emacs Lisp mode could put an overlay on the defun for every |
| 86 | function that has advice. The overlay could have `after-text' like " |
| 87 | [Function has advice]". It might look like |
| 88 | (defun foo [Function has advice] (x y) |
| 89 | The overlay could also be a button that you could use to view the advice. |
| 90 | |
| 91 | ** ange-ftp |
| 92 | *** understand sftp |
| 93 | *** Use MLS for ange-ftp-insert-directory if a list of files is specified. |
| 94 | |
| 95 | ** Ability to map a key, including all modified-combinations. |
| 96 | E.g map mouse-4 to wheel-up as well as M-mouse-4 -> M-wheel-up |
| 97 | M-C-mouse-4 -> M-C-wheel-up, H-S-C-M-s-double-mouse-4 -> |
| 98 | H-S-C-M-s-double-wheel-up, ... |
| 99 | |
| 100 | ** Beefed-up syntax-tables. |
| 101 | *** recognize multi-character syntactic entities like `begin' and `end'. |
| 102 | *** nested string-delimiters (for Postscript's (foo(bar)baz) strings). |
| 103 | *** support for infix operators (with precedence). |
| 104 | *** support for the $ (paired delimiter) in parse-partial-sexp. |
| 105 | *** support for hook-chars whose effect on the parsing-state is specified |
| 106 | by elisp code. Thus a char could both close a string and open a comment |
| 107 | at the same time and do it in a context-sensitive way. |
| 108 | *** ability to add mode-specific data to the partial-parse-state. |
| 109 | |
| 110 | ** Add a way to convert a keyboard macro to equivalent Lisp code. |
| 111 | |
| 112 | ** Have a command suggestion help system that recognizes patterns |
| 113 | of commands which could be replaced with a simpler common command. |
| 114 | It should not make more than one suggestion per 10 minutes. |
| 115 | |
| 116 | ** Add a way to define input methods by computing them (when first used) |
| 117 | from other input methods. Then redefine C-x 8 to use a |
| 118 | user-selected input method, with the default being the union of |
| 119 | latin-1-prefix and latin-1-postfix. |
| 120 | |
| 121 | ** Implement a clean way to use different major modes for |
| 122 | different parts of a buffer. This could be useful in editing |
| 123 | Bison input files, for instance, or other kinds of text |
| 124 | where one language is embedded in another language. |
| 125 | |
| 126 | ** Give start-process the ability to direct standard-error |
| 127 | output to a different filter. |
| 128 | |
| 129 | ** Make desktop.el save the "frame configuration" of Emacs (in some |
| 130 | useful sense). |
| 131 | |
| 132 | ** Give desktop.el a feature to switch between different named |
| 133 | desktops. |
| 134 | |
| 135 | ** Replace finder.el with something that generates an Info file |
| 136 | which gives the same information through a menu structure. [Dave |
| 137 | Love started on this.] |
| 138 | |
| 139 | ** Implement a variant of uncompress.el or jka-compr.el that works with |
| 140 | GNU Privacy Guard for encryption. [Code exists but isn't assigned. |
| 141 | See the Gnus development sources for assigned code concerning GPG |
| 142 | use with mail, which is probably a good start.] |
| 143 | |
| 144 | ** Save undo information in special temporary files, and reload it |
| 145 | when needed for undoing. This could extend undo capacity. |
| 146 | |
| 147 | ** Change the Windows NT menu code |
| 148 | so that it handles the deep_p argument and avoids |
| 149 | regenerating the whole menu bar menu tree except |
| 150 | when the user tries to use the menubar. |
| 151 | |
| 152 | This requires the RIT to forward the WM_INITMENU message to |
| 153 | the main thread, and not return from that message until the main |
| 154 | thread has processed the MENU_BAR_ACTIVATE_EVENT and regenerated |
| 155 | the whole menu bar. In the mean time, it should process other messages. |
| 156 | |
| 157 | ** Get some major packages installed: W3 (development version needs |
| 158 | significant work), PSGML. Check the assignments file for other |
| 159 | packages which might go in and have been missed. |
| 160 | |
| 161 | ** Make keymaps a first-class Lisp object (this means a rewrite of |
| 162 | keymap.c). What should it do apart from being opaque ? |
| 163 | multiple inheritance ? faster where-is ? no more fix_submap_inheritance ? |
| 164 | what else ? |
| 165 | |
| 166 | ** Provide real menus on ttys. The MS-DOS implementation can serve as |
| 167 | an example how to do part of this. |
| 168 | |
| 169 | ** Implement popular parts of the rest of the CL functions as compiler |
| 170 | macros in cl-macs. |
| 171 | |
| 172 | ** Make compiler warnings about functions that might be undefined at run time |
| 173 | smarter, so that they know which files are required by the file being |
| 174 | compiled and don't warn about functions defined in them. |
| 175 | |
| 176 | ** Highlight rectangles (`mouse-track-rectangle-p' in XEmacs). Already in CUA, |
| 177 | but it's a valuable feature worth making more general. |
| 178 | |
| 179 | ** Support simultaneous tty and X frames. |
| 180 | |
| 181 | ** Provide MIME support for Rmail using the Gnus MIME library. [Maybe |
| 182 | not now feasible, given Gnus maintenance decisions. fx looked at |
| 183 | this and can say where some of the problems are.] |
| 184 | |
| 185 | ** Eliminate the storm of warnings concerning char/unsigned char |
| 186 | mismatches that we get with proprietary compilers on various systems. |
| 187 | They make it difficult to spot the important warnings. |
| 188 | |
| 189 | ** Fix anything necessary to use `long long' EMACS_INTs with GCC. |
| 190 | |
| 191 | ** Split out parts of lisp.h and generate Makefile dependencies |
| 192 | automatically. |
| 193 | |
| 194 | ** Update the FAQ. |
| 195 | |
| 196 | ** Allow auto-compression-mode to use zlib calls if zlib is available. |
| 197 | [It's required for PNG, so may be linked anyhow.] |
| 198 | |
| 199 | ** Add a --pristine startup flag which does -q --no-site-file plus |
| 200 | ignoring X resources (Doze equivalents?) and most of the |
| 201 | environment. What should not be ignored needs consideration. |
| 202 | |
| 203 | ** Investigate using the language environment (or locale?) to set up |
| 204 | more things, such as the default Ispell dictionary, calendar |
| 205 | holidays, quoting characters?,... |
| 206 | |
| 207 | ** Improve the GC (generational, incremental). (We may be able to use |
| 208 | the Boehm collector.) [See the Boehm-GC branch in CVS for work on |
| 209 | this.] |
| 210 | |
| 211 | ** Check what hooks would help Emacspeak -- see the defadvising in W3. |
| 212 | |
| 213 | ** Add horizontal scroll bars. |
| 214 | |
| 215 | ** Provide an optional feature which computes a scroll bar slider's |
| 216 | size and its position from lines instead of characters. |
| 217 | |
| 218 | ** Make the Custom themes support do useful things. |
| 219 | |
| 220 | ** Add support for SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) rendering to |
| 221 | Emacs. |
| 222 | |
| 223 | ** Allow unknown image types to be rendered via an external program |
| 224 | converting them to, say, PBM (in the same way as PostScript?). |
| 225 | |
| 226 | ** Allow displaying an X window from an external program in a buffer, |
| 227 | e.g. to render graphics from Java applets. [gerd and/or wmperry |
| 228 | thought this was feasible.] |
| 229 | |
| 230 | ** Allow images (not just text) in the margin to be mouse-sensitive. |
| 231 | (Requires recursing through display properties). Provide some way |
| 232 | to simulate mouse-clicks on marginal text without a mouse. |
| 233 | |
| 234 | ** Implement Lisp functions to determine properly whether a character |
| 235 | is displayable (particularly needed in XFree 4, sigh). Use it to |
| 236 | define useful glyphs that may be displayed as images or unicodes |
| 237 | (with ASCIIfied fallback via latin1-disp). Examples include |
| 238 | box-drawing graphics in Custom buffers, W3 rules and tables, and |
| 239 | tree displays generally, mode-line mail indicator. [See work done |
| 240 | already for Emacs 22 and consult fx.] |
| 241 | |
| 242 | ** Do something to make rms happy with fx's dynamic loading, and use it |
| 243 | to implement things like auto-loaded buffer parsers and database |
| 244 | access in cases which need more than Lisp. |
| 245 | |
| 246 | ** Extend ps-print to deal with multiple font sizes, images, and extra |
| 247 | encodings. |
| 248 | |
| 249 | ** Provide portable undumping using mmap (per gerd design). |
| 250 | |
| 251 | ** Use the XIE X extension, if available, for image display. |
| 252 | |
| 253 | ** Make monochrome images display using the foreground and background |
| 254 | colors of the applicable faces. |
| 255 | |
| 256 | ** Add support for rendering antialiased text, probably using |
| 257 | XRender/Freetype. |
| 258 | |
| 259 | ** Port the conservative stack marking code of Emacs' garbage collector |
| 260 | to more systems, so that we can completely get rid of GCPROs. |
| 261 | |
| 262 | ** Reorder defcustom's in each package so that the more important |
| 263 | options come first in the Customize buffers. This could be done by |
| 264 | either rearranging the file (since options are shown in the order |
| 265 | they appear in the *.el files), or by adding a few :set-after |
| 266 | attributes. |
| 267 | |
| 268 | ** Maybe document the features of libraries missing from the manual (or |
| 269 | ancillary manuals, including the Lisp manual in some cases). |
| 270 | This is not worth doing for all of these packages and we need not |
| 271 | aim for completeness, but some may be worth documenting. |
| 272 | |
| 273 | Here's a list which is probably not complete/correct: align, allout, |
| 274 | artist, ansi-color, array, battery, calculator, cdl, cmuscheme, |
| 275 | completion, cua, delim-col, dirtrack, double, echistory, elide-head, |
| 276 | easymenu, expand, flow-ctrl, format [format-alist], |
| 277 | generic/generic-x [various modes], kermit, log-edit, ledit |
| 278 | [obsolete?], makesum, midnight [other than in Kill Buffer node], |
| 279 | mouse-copy [?], mouse-drag, mouse-sel, net-utils, rcompile, |
| 280 | snmp-mode [?], soundex [should be interactive?], strokes [start from |
| 281 | the web page], talk, thingatpt [interactive functions?], type-break, |
| 282 | vcursor, xscheme, zone-mode [?], mlconvert [?], iso-cvt, iso-swed, |
| 283 | swedish, feedmail [?], uce, bruce, gametree, meese, page-ext, |
| 284 | refbib, refer, scribe, sgml-mode, spell, texinfo, underline, |
| 285 | cmacexp, hideif, mantemp [obsolete?], pcomplete, assoc, xml, |
| 286 | cvs-status (should be described in PCL-CVS manual); other progmodes, |
| 287 | probably in separate manual. |
| 288 | |
| 289 | ** Convert the XPM bitmaps to PPM, replace the PBMs with them and scrap |
| 290 | the XPMs so that the colour versions work generally. (Requires care |
| 291 | with the colour used for the transparent regions.) |
| 292 | |
| 293 | ** Convenient access to the `values' variable. It would be nice to have an |
| 294 | interface that would show you the printed reps of the elements of the |
| 295 | list in a menu, let you select one of the values, and put it into some |
| 296 | other variable, without changing the value of `values'. |
| 297 | |
| 298 | ** (Controlled by a flag) make open and close syntax match exactly, |
| 299 | i.e. `(' doesn't match `]'. |
| 300 | |
| 301 | ** Specify parameter ID-FORMAT in all calls to `file-attributes' and |
| 302 | `directory-files-and-attributes' where attributes UID or GID are used. |
| 303 | Whenever possible, use value 'string. |
| 304 | When done, change meaning of default value from 'integer to 'string. |
| 305 | If value 'integer is used nowhere, remove the parameter ID-FORMAT from |
| 306 | the definition of `file-attributes' and `directory-files-and-attributes' |
| 307 | and from the calls. |
| 308 | |
| 309 | ** Make language-info-alist customizable. Currently a user can customize |
| 310 | only the variable `current-language-environment'. |
| 311 | |
| 312 | ** Improve language environment handling so that Emacs can fit |
| 313 | better to a users locale. Currently Emacs uses utf-8 language |
| 314 | environment for all utf-8 locales, thus a user in ja_JP.UTF-8 locale |
| 315 | are also put in utf-8 lang. env. In such a case, it is |
| 316 | better to use Japanese lang. env. but prefer utf-8 coding system. |
| 317 | |
| 318 | ** Eliminate the current restriction on header printing by ps-print. |
| 319 | Currently, a header can contain only single 1-byte charset in |
| 320 | addition to ASCII. |
| 321 | |
| 322 | ** In ps-print, provide an user friendly interface to specify fonts. |
| 323 | |
| 324 | ** OpenType font support for various complex scripts (e.g. Devanagari). |
| 325 | As X protocal doesn't provide a way to access OpenType Layout Tables |
| 326 | in a OpenType font of a server side, we need a way to utilize local |
| 327 | fonts (perhaps by directly using the Freetype library or indirectly |
| 328 | via Xft library). |
| 329 | |
| 330 | ** Enhance word boundary detection for such a script that doesn't use |
| 331 | space at word boundary (e.g. Thai). |
| 332 | |
| 333 | ** Implement interface programs with major Japanese conversion server |
| 334 | in lib-src so that they can be used from the input method |
| 335 | "japanese". Currently, most Japanese users are using external |
| 336 | packages (e.g. tamago, anthy) or an input method via XIM. |
| 337 | |
| 338 | ** Provide the toolbar on ttys. This could map a bit like tmm-menubar |
| 339 | for the menubar and buttons could look a bit like those used by customize. |
| 340 | |
| 341 | * Internal changes |
| 342 | |
| 343 | ** Replace gmalloc.c with the modified Doug Lea code from the current |
| 344 | GNU libc so that the special mmapping of buffers can be removed -- |
| 345 | that apparently loses under Solaris, at least. [fx has mostly done |
| 346 | this.] |
| 347 | |
| 348 | ** Rewrite make-docfile to be clean and maintainable. |
| 349 | |
| 350 | ** Add an inferior-comint-minor-mode to capture the common set of operations |
| 351 | offered by major modes that offer an associated inferior |
| 352 | comint-derived mode. I.e. basically make cmuscheme.el/inf-lisp.el generic. |
| 353 | For use by sml-mode, python-mode, tex-mode, scheme-mode, lisp-mode, |
| 354 | haskell-mode, tuareg-mode, ... |
| 355 | |
| 356 | ;;; arch-tag: b0a3e40b-726a-457d-9999-ba848321b036 |