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 Important features:
  16
  17 * Provide user-friendly ways to list all available font families,
  18   display a font as a sample, etc.  [fx is looking at multilingual
  19   font selection for Emacs 22.]
  20
  21 * Program Enriched mode to read and save in RTF.  [Is there actually a
  22   decent single definition of RTF?]
  23
  24 * Implement something better than the current Refill mode.  This
  25   probably needs some primitive support.
  26
  27 * Implement primitive and higher-level functions to allow filling
  28   properly with variable-pitch faces.
  29
  30 * Implement a smoother vertical scroll facility, one that allows
  31   C-v to scroll through a tall image.
  32
  33 * Implement other text formatting properties.
  34 ** Footnotes that can appear either in place or at the end of the page.
  35 ** text property that says "don't break line in middle of this".
  36    Don't break the line between two characters that have the
  37    same value of this property.
  38 ** Discretionary hyphens that are not visible when they are at end of line.
  39
  40 * Make movemail work with IMAP.
  41
  42 * Internationalize Emacs's messages.  [Note that this is of limited
  43   use until the menus can display multilingual text.  It also doesn't
  44   address important issues like using the names of symbols essentially
  45   as documentation, e.g. in command names and Custom.  -- fx]
  46
  47 * Make the Lucid menu widget display multilingual text.  [This
  48   probably needs to be done from actual Emacs buffers, either directly
  49   in the menu or by rendering in an unmapped window and copying the
  50   pixels.  Note that the relevant Xlib functions assume a specific
  51   locale; that isn't good enough even if X can render the arbitrary
  52   text, which it often can't as far as I can tell.  -- fx] [The gtk
  53   port now displays multilingual text in menus, but only insofar as
  54   Emacs can encode it as utf-8 and gtk can display the result.]
  55
  56 * Remove the limitation that window and frame widths and heights can
  57   be only full columns/lines.
  58
  59 * Move fringe to be displayed between display margins and text area.
  60   [KFS is looking into this].
  61
  62 * Set fringe widths per-window/per-buffer.
  63
  64 * Make fringe bitmaps user configurable.  Maybe add ability to add
  65   additional bitmaps to the fringe from lisp.
  66
  67 Other features we would like:
  68
  69 * Have a command suggestion help system that recognizes patterns
  70   of commands which could be replaced with a simpler common command.
  71   It should not make more than one suggestion per 10 minutes.
  72
  73 * Add a way to define input methods by computing them (when first used)
  74   from other input methods.  Then redefine C-x 8 to use a
  75   user-selected input method, with the default being the union of
  76   latin-1-prefix and latin-1-postfix.
  77
  78 * Implement a clean way to use different major modes for
  79   different parts of a buffer.
  80
  81 * Give start-process the ability to direct standard-error
  82   output to a different filter.
  83
  84 * Make desktop.el save the "frame configuration" of Emacs (in some
  85   useful sense).
  86
  87 * Give desktop.el a feature to switch between different named
  88   desktops.
  89
  90 * Replace finder.el with something that generates an Info file
  91   which gives the same information through a menu structure.  [Dave
  92   Love started on this.]
  93
  94 * Implement a variant of uncompress.el or jka-compr.el that works with
  95   GNU Privacy Guard for encryption.  [Code exists but isn't assigned.
  96   See the Gnus development sources for assigned code concerning GPG
  97   use with mail, which is probably a good start.]
  98
  99 * Save undo information in files, and reload it when needed
 100   for undoing.
 101
 102 * Merge the Emacs regex.c with the Glibc regex.c.
 103   They split off a few years ago through negligence.
 104
 105 * Change the Windows NT menu code
 106   so that it handles the deep_p argument and avoids
 107   regenerating the whole menu bar menu tree except
 108   when the user tries to use the menubar.
 109
 110   This requires the RIT to forward the WM_INITMENU message to
 111   the main thread, and not return from that message until the main
 112   thread has processed the MENU_BAR_ACTIVATE_EVENT and regenerated
 113   the whole menu bar.  In the mean time, it should process other messages.
 114
 115 * Get some major packages installed: W3/url (development version needs
 116   significant work), PSGML.  Check the assignments file for other
 117   packages which might go in and have been missed.
 118
 119 * Make keymaps a first-class Lisp object (this means a rewrite of
 120   keymap.c).  What should it do apart from being opaque ?
 121   multiple inheritance ?  faster where-is ?  no more fix_submap_inheritance ?
 122   what else ?
 123
 124 * Provide real menus on ttys.  The MS-DOS implementation can serve as
 125   an example how to do part of this.
 126
 127 * Implement popular parts of the rest of the CL functions as compiler
 128   macros in cl-macs.
 129
 130 * Highlight rectangles (`mouse-track-rectangle-p' in XEmacs).  Already in CUA,
 131   but it's a valuable feature worth making more general.
 132
 133 * Support simultaneous tty and X frames.
 134
 135 * Provide MIME support for Rmail using the Gnus MIME library.  [Maybe
 136   not now feasible, given Gnus maintenance decisions.  fx looked at
 137   this and can say where some of the problems are.]
 138
 139 * Eliminate the storm of warnings concerning char/unsigned char
 140   mismatches that we get with proprietary compilers on various systems.
 141   They make it difficult to spot the important warnings.
 142
 143 * Fix anything necessary to use `long long' EMACS_INTs with GCC.
 144
 145 * Split out parts of lisp.h and generate Makefile dependencies
 146   automatically.
 147
 148 * Update the FAQ.
 149
 150 * Allow auto-compression-mode to use zlib calls if zlib is available.
 151   [It's required for PNG, so may be linked anyhow.]
 152
 153 * Add a --pristine startup flag which does -q --no-site-file plus
 154   ignoring X resources (Doze equivalents?) and most of the
 155   environment.  What should not be ignored needs consideration.
 156
 157 * Investigate using the language environment (or locale?) to set up
 158   more things, such as the default Ispell dictionary, calendar
 159   holidays, quoting characters?,...
 160
 161 * Improve the GC (generational, incremental).  (We may be able to use
 162   the Boehm collector.)  [See the Boehm-GC branch in CVS for work on
 163   this.]
 164
 165 * Check what hooks would help Emacspeak -- see the defadvising in W3.
 166
 167 * Implement some variety of (non-gtk) drag-and-drop support under X.
 168   Using libdnd might be a good start.
 169
 170 * Add horizontal scroll bars.
 171
 172 * Provide an optional feature which computes a scroll bar slider's
 173   size and its position from lines instead of characters.
 174
 175 * Make the Custom themes support do useful things.
 176
 177 * Investigate using GNU Lightning or similar system for incremental
 178   compilation of selected bytecode functions to subrs.  Converting CCL
 179   programs to native code is probably the first thing to try, though.
 180
 181 * Add a feature to Info similar to "info --apropos SUBJECT".
 182
 183 * Add support for SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) rendering to
 184   Emacs.
 185
 186 * Allow unknown image types to be rendered via an external program
 187   converting them to, say, PBM (in the same way as PostScript?).
 188
 189 * Allow displaying an X window from an external program in a buffer,
 190   e.g. to render graphics from Java applets.  [gerd and/or wmperry
 191   thought this was feasible.]
 192
 193 * Allow images (not just text) in the margin to be mouse-sensitive.
 194   (Requires recursing through display properties).  Provide some way
 195   to simulate mouse-clicks on marginal text without a mouse.
 196
 197 * Implement Lisp functions to determine properly whether a character
 198   is displayable (particularly needed in XFree 4, sigh).  Use it to
 199   define useful glyphs that may be displayed as images or unicodes
 200   (with ASCIIfied fallback via latin1-disp).  Examples include
 201   box-drawing graphics in Custom buffers, W3 rules and tables, and
 202   tree displays generally, mode-line mail indicator.  [See work done
 203   already for Emacs 22 and consult fx.]
 204
 205 * Do something to make rms happy with fx's dynamic loading, and use it
 206   to implement things like auto-loaded buffer parsers and database
 207   access in cases which need more than Lisp.
 208
 209 * Extend ps-print to deal with multiple font sizes, images, and extra
 210   encodings.
 211
 212 * Provide portable undumping using mmap (per gerd design).
 213
 214 * Replace gmalloc.c with the modified Doug Lea code from the current
 215   GNU libc so that the special mmapping of buffers can be removed --
 216   that apparently loses under Solaris, at least.  [fx has mostly done
 217   this.]
 218
 219 * Use the XIE X extension, if available, for image display.
 220
 221 * Make monochrome images display using the foreground and background
 222   colors of the applicable faces.
 223
 224 * Add support for rendering antialiased text, probably using
 225   XRender/Freetype.
 226
 227 * Rewrite make-docfile to be clean and maintainable.
 228
 229 * Port the conservative stack marking code of Emacs' garbage collector
 230   to more systems, so that we can completely get rid of GCPROs.
 231
 232 * Reorder defcustom's in each package so that the more important
 233   options come first in the Customize buffers.  This could be done by
 234   either rearranging the file (since options are shown in the order
 235   they appear in the *.el files), or by adding a few :set-after
 236   attributes.
 237
 238 * Maybe document the features of libraries missing from the manual (or
 239   ancillary manuals, including the Lisp manual in some cases).
 240   This is not worth doing for all of these packages and we need not
 241   aim for completeness, but some may be worth documenting.
 242
 243   Here's a list which is probably not complete/correct: align, allout,
 244   artist, ansi-color, array, battery, calculator, cdl, cmuscheme,
 245   completion, cua, delim-col, dirtrack, double, echistory, elide-head,
 246   easymenu, expand, flow-ctrl, format [format-alist],
 247   generic/generic-x [various modes], kermit, log-edit, ledit
 248   [obsolete?], makesum, midnight [other than in Kill Buffer node],
 249   mouse-copy [?], mouse-drag, mouse-sel, net-utils, rcompile,
 250   snmp-mode [?], soundex [should be interactive?], strokes [start from
 251   the web page], talk, thingatpt [interactive functions?], type-break,
 252   vcursor, xscheme, zone-mode [?], mlconvert [?], iso-cvt, iso-swed,
 253   swedish, feedmail [?], uce, bruce, gametree, meese, page-ext,
 254   refbib, refer, scribe, sgml-mode, spell, texinfo, underline,
 255   cmacexp, hideif, mantemp [obsolete?], pcomplete, assoc, xml,
 256   cvs-status (should be described in PCL-CVS manual); other progmodes,
 257   probably in separate manual.
 258
 259 * Provide a means to extract image-relative coordinates from mouse
 260   clicks on images.  (Needed for W3, at least.)  Also useful for W3
 261   and Gnus: allow images to scroll properly.
 262
 263 * Convert the XPM bitmaps to PPM, replace the PBMs with them and scrap
 264   the XPMs so that the colour versions work generally.  (Requires care
 265   with the colour used for the transparent regions.)
 266
 267 * Convenient access to the `values' variable.  It would be nice to have an
 268   interface that would show you the printed reps of the elements of the
 269   list in a menu, let you select one of the values, and put it into some
 270   other variable, without changing the value of `values'.
 271
 272 * Fix skip-chars-{for,back}ward to allow character classes.
 273
 274 ;;; arch-tag: b0a3e40b-726a-457d-9999-ba848321b036