etc/TODO

   1                                                                 -*-text-*-
   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 * Make compile.el record the markers that point to error loci
  13   on text properties in the error message lines.
  14
  15 * Fix the kill/yank treatment of invisible text. At the moment,
  16   invisible text is placed in the kill-ring, so that the contents of
  17   the ring may not correspond to the text as displayed to the user. It
  18   ought to be possible to omit text which is invisible (due to a
  19   text-property, overlay, or selective display) from the kill-ring.
  20
  21 Important features:
  22
  23 * Provide user-friendly ways to list all available font families,
  24   display a font as a sample, etc.  [fx is looking at multilingual
  25   font selection for Emacs 22.]
  26
  27 * Program Enriched mode to read and save in RTF.  [Is there actually a
  28   decent single definition of RTF?  Maybe see info at
  29   http://latex2rtf.sourceforge.net/.]
  30
  31 * Implement something better than the current Refill mode.  This
  32   probably needs some primitive support.
  33
  34 * Implement primitive and higher-level functions to allow filling
  35   properly with variable-pitch faces.
  36
  37 * Implement a smoother vertical scroll facility, one that allows
  38   C-v to scroll through a tall image.
  39
  40 * Implement other text formatting properties.
  41 ** Footnotes that can appear either in place or at the end of the page.
  42 ** text property that says "don't break line in middle of this".
  43    Don't break the line between two characters that have the
  44    same value of this property.
  45 ** Discretionary hyphens that are not visible when they are at end of line.
  46
  47 * Make movemail work with IMAP.
  48
  49 * Internationalize Emacs's messages.  [Note that this is of limited
  50   use until the menus can display multilingual text.  It also doesn't
  51   address important issues like using the names of symbols essentially
  52   as documentation, e.g. in command names and Custom.  -- fx]
  53
  54 * Make the Lucid menu widget display multilingual text.  [This
  55   probably needs to be done from actual Emacs buffers, either directly
  56   in the menu or by rendering in an unmapped window and copying the
  57   pixels.  Note that the relevant Xlib functions assume a specific
  58   locale; that isn't good enough even if X can render the arbitrary
  59   text, which it often can't as far as I can tell.  -- fx] [The gtk
  60   port now displays multilingual text in menus, but only insofar as
  61   Emacs can encode it as utf-8 and gtk can display the result.]
  62
  63 * Remove the limitation that window and frame widths and heights can
  64   be only full columns/lines.
  65
  66 Other features we would like:
  67
  68 * Have a command suggestion help system that recognizes patterns
  69   of commands which could be replaced with a simpler common command.
  70   It should not make more than one suggestion per 10 minutes.
  71
  72 * Add a way to define input methods by computing them (when first used)
  73   from other input methods.  Then redefine C-x 8 to use a
  74   user-selected input method, with the default being the union of
  75   latin-1-prefix and latin-1-postfix.
  76
  77 * Implement a clean way to use different major modes for
  78   different parts of a buffer.
  79
  80 * Give start-process the ability to direct standard-error
  81   output to a different filter.
  82
  83 * Make desktop.el save the "frame configuration" of Emacs (in some
  84   useful sense).
  85
  86 * Give desktop.el a feature to switch between different named
  87   desktops.
  88
  89 * Replace finder.el with something that generates an Info file
  90   which gives the same information through a menu structure.  [Dave
  91   Love started on this.]
  92
  93 * Implement a variant of uncompress.el or jka-compr.el that works with
  94   GNU Privacy Guard for encryption.  [Code exists but isn't assigned.
  95   See the Gnus development sources for assigned code concerning GPG
  96   use with mail, which is probably a good start.]
  97
  98 * Save undo information in files, and reload it when needed
  99   for undoing.
 100
 101 * Merge the Emacs regex.c with the Glibc regex.c.
 102   They split off a few years ago through negligence.
 103
 104 * Change the Windows NT menu code
 105   so that it handles the deep_p argument and avoids
 106   regenerating the whole menu bar menu tree except
 107   when the user tries to use the menubar.
 108
 109   This requires the RIT to forward the WM_INITMENU message to
 110   the main thread, and not return from that message until the main
 111   thread has processed the MENU_BAR_ACTIVATE_EVENT and regenerated
 112   the whole menu bar.  In the mean time, it should process other messages.
 113
 114 * Get some major packages installed: W3/url (development version needs
 115   significant work), PSGML.  Check the assignments file for other
 116   packages which might go in and have been missed.
 117
 118 * Make keymaps a first-class Lisp object (this means a rewrite of
 119   keymap.c).  What should it do apart from being opaque ?
 120   multiple inheritance ?  faster where-is ?  no more fix_submap_inheritance ?
 121   what else ?
 122
 123 * Provide real menus on ttys.  The MS-DOS implementation can serve as
 124   an example how to do part of this.
 125
 126 * Implement popular parts of the rest of the CL functions as compiler
 127   macros in cl-macs.
 128
 129 * Highlight rectangles (`mouse-track-rectangle-p' in XEmacs).  Already in CUA,
 130   but it's a valuable feature worth making more general.
 131
 132 * Support simultaneous tty and X frames.
 133
 134 * Provide MIME support for Rmail using the Gnus MIME library.  [Maybe
 135   not now feasible, given Gnus maintenance decisions.  fx looked at
 136   this and can say where some of the problems are.]
 137
 138 * Eliminate the storm of warnings concerning char/unsigned char
 139   mismatches that we get with proprietary compilers on various systems.
 140   They make it difficult to spot the important warnings.
 141
 142 * Fix anything necessary to use `long long' EMACS_INTs with GCC.
 143
 144 * Split out parts of lisp.h and generate Makefile dependencies
 145   automatically.
 146
 147 * Update the FAQ.
 148
 149 * Allow auto-compression-mode to use zlib calls if zlib is available.
 150   [It's required for PNG, so may be linked anyhow.]
 151
 152 * Add a --pristine startup flag which does -q --no-site-file plus
 153   ignoring X resources (Doze equivalents?) and most of the
 154   environment.  What should not be ignored needs consideration.
 155
 156 * Investigate using the language environment (or locale?) to set up
 157   more things, such as the default Ispell dictionary, calendar
 158   holidays, quoting characters?,...
 159
 160 * Improve the GC (generational, incremental).  (We may be able to use
 161   the Boehm collector.)  [See the Boehm-GC branch in CVS for work on
 162   this.]
 163
 164 * Check what hooks would help Emacspeak -- see the defadvising in W3.
 165
 166 * Add horizontal scroll bars.
 167
 168 * Provide an optional feature which computes a scroll bar slider's
 169   size and its position from lines instead of characters.
 170
 171 * Make the Custom themes support do useful things.
 172
 173 * Investigate using GNU Lightning or similar system for incremental
 174   compilation of selected bytecode functions to subrs.  Converting CCL
 175   programs to native code is probably the first thing to try, though.
 176
 177 * Add a feature to Info similar to "info --apropos SUBJECT".
 178
 179 * Add support for SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) rendering to
 180   Emacs.
 181
 182 * Allow unknown image types to be rendered via an external program
 183   converting them to, say, PBM (in the same way as PostScript?).
 184
 185 * Allow displaying an X window from an external program in a buffer,
 186   e.g. to render graphics from Java applets.  [gerd and/or wmperry
 187   thought this was feasible.]
 188
 189 * Allow images (not just text) in the margin to be mouse-sensitive.
 190   (Requires recursing through display properties).  Provide some way
 191   to simulate mouse-clicks on marginal text without a mouse.
 192
 193 * Implement Lisp functions to determine properly whether a character
 194   is displayable (particularly needed in XFree 4, sigh).  Use it to
 195   define useful glyphs that may be displayed as images or unicodes
 196   (with ASCIIfied fallback via latin1-disp).  Examples include
 197   box-drawing graphics in Custom buffers, W3 rules and tables, and
 198   tree displays generally, mode-line mail indicator.  [See work done
 199   already for Emacs 22 and consult fx.]
 200
 201 * Do something to make rms happy with fx's dynamic loading, and use it
 202   to implement things like auto-loaded buffer parsers and database
 203   access in cases which need more than Lisp.
 204
 205 * Extend ps-print to deal with multiple font sizes, images, and extra
 206   encodings.
 207
 208 * Provide portable undumping using mmap (per gerd design).
 209
 210 * Replace gmalloc.c with the modified Doug Lea code from the current
 211   GNU libc so that the special mmapping of buffers can be removed --
 212   that apparently loses under Solaris, at least.  [fx has mostly done
 213   this.]
 214
 215 * Use the XIE X extension, if available, for image display.
 216
 217 * Make monochrome images display using the foreground and background
 218   colors of the applicable faces.
 219
 220 * Add support for rendering antialiased text, probably using
 221   XRender/Freetype.
 222
 223 * Rewrite make-docfile to be clean and maintainable.
 224
 225 * Port the conservative stack marking code of Emacs' garbage collector
 226   to more systems, so that we can completely get rid of GCPROs.
 227
 228 * Reorder defcustom's in each package so that the more important
 229   options come first in the Customize buffers.  This could be done by
 230   either rearranging the file (since options are shown in the order
 231   they appear in the *.el files), or by adding a few :set-after
 232   attributes.
 233
 234 * Maybe document the features of libraries missing from the manual (or
 235   ancillary manuals, including the Lisp manual in some cases).
 236   This is not worth doing for all of these packages and we need not
 237   aim for completeness, but some may be worth documenting.
 238
 239   Here's a list which is probably not complete/correct: align, allout,
 240   artist, ansi-color, array, battery, calculator, cdl, cmuscheme,
 241   completion, cua, delim-col, dirtrack, double, echistory, elide-head,
 242   easymenu, expand, flow-ctrl, format [format-alist],
 243   generic/generic-x [various modes], kermit, log-edit, ledit
 244   [obsolete?], makesum, midnight [other than in Kill Buffer node],
 245   mouse-copy [?], mouse-drag, mouse-sel, net-utils, rcompile,
 246   snmp-mode [?], soundex [should be interactive?], strokes [start from
 247   the web page], talk, thingatpt [interactive functions?], type-break,
 248   vcursor, xscheme, zone-mode [?], mlconvert [?], iso-cvt, iso-swed,
 249   swedish, feedmail [?], uce, bruce, gametree, meese, page-ext,
 250   refbib, refer, scribe, sgml-mode, spell, texinfo, underline,
 251   cmacexp, hideif, mantemp [obsolete?], pcomplete, assoc, xml,
 252   cvs-status (should be described in PCL-CVS manual); other progmodes,
 253   probably in separate manual.
 254
 255 * Convert the XPM bitmaps to PPM, replace the PBMs with them and scrap
 256   the XPMs so that the colour versions work generally.  (Requires care
 257   with the colour used for the transparent regions.)
 258
 259 * Convenient access to the `values' variable.  It would be nice to have an
 260   interface that would show you the printed reps of the elements of the
 261   list in a menu, let you select one of the values, and put it into some
 262   other variable, without changing the value of `values'.
 263
 264 * Fix skip-chars-{for,back}ward to allow character classes.
 265
 266 * (Controlled by a flag) make open and close syntax match exactly,
 267   i.e. `(' doesn't match `]'.
 268
 269 * Specify parameter ID-FORMAT in all calls to `file-attributes' and
 270   `directory-files-and-attributes' where attributes UID or GID are used.
 271   Whenever possible, use value 'string.
 272   When done, change meaning of default value from 'integer to 'string.
 273   If value 'integer is used nowhere, remove the parameter ID-FORMAT from
 274   the definition of `file-attributes' and `directory-files-and-attributes'
 275   and from the calls.
 276
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