(Writing Emacs Primitives): Strings are

[bpt/emacs.git] / etc / TODO

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If you are ready to start working on any of these TODO items, we
appreciate your help; please write to emacs-devel@gnu.org so we can be
aware that the problem is being addressed, and talk with you how to do
it best.  Since Emacs is an FSF-copyrighted packages, please be
prepared to sign legal papers to transfer the copyright on your work
to the FSF.

Small but important fixes needed in existing features:

* Make compile.el record the markers that point to error loci
  on text properties in the error message lines.

Important features:

* Provide user-friendly ways to list all available font families,
  display a font as a sample, etc.  [fx is looking at multilingual
  font selection for Emacs 22.]

* Program Enriched mode to read and save in RTF.  [Is there actually a
  decent single definition of RTF?]

* Implement something better than the current Refill mode.  This
  probably needs some primitive support.

* Implement primitive and higher-level functions to allow filling
  properly with variable-pitch faces.

* Implement a smoother vertical scroll facility, one that allows
  C-v to scroll through a tall image.

* Implement other text formatting properties.
** Footnotes that can appear either in place or at the end of the page.
** text property that says "don't break line in middle of this".
   Don't break the line between two characters that have the
   same value of this property.
** Discretionary hyphens that are not visible when they are at end of line.

* Make movemail work with IMAP.

* Internationalize Emacs's messages.  [Note that this is of limited
  use until the menus can display multilingual text.  It also doesn't
  address important issues like using the names of symbols essentially
  as documentation, e.g. in command names and Custom.  -- fx]

* Make the Lucid menu widget display multilingual text.  [This
  probably needs to be done from actual Emacs buffers, either directly
  in the menu or by rendering in an unmapped window and copying the
  pixels.  Note that the relevant Xlib functions assume a specific
  locale; that isn't good enough even if X can render the arbitrary
  text, which it often can't as far as I can tell.  -- fx]

* Remove the limitation that window and frame widths and heights can
  be only full columns/lines.

* Move fringe to be displayed between display margins and text area.
  [KFS is looking into this].

* Set fringe widths per-window/per-buffer.

* Make fringe bitmaps user configurable.  Maybe add ability to add
  additional bitmaps to the fringe from lisp.

Other features we would like:

* Have a command suggestion help system that recognizes patterns
  of commands which could be replaced with a simpler common command.
  It should not make more than one suggestion per 10 minutes.

* Add a way to define input methods by computing them (when first used)
  from other input methods.  Then redefine C-x 8 to use a
  user-selected input method, with the default being the union of
  latin-1-prefix and latin-1-postfix.

* Implement a clean way to use different major modes for
  different parts of a buffer.

* Give start-process the ability to direct standard-error
  output to a different filter.

* Make desktop.el save the "frame configuration" of Emacs (in some
  useful sense).

* Give desktop.el a feature to switch between different named
  desktops.

* Replace finder.el with something that generates an Info file
  which gives the same information through a menu structure.  [Dave
  Love started on this.]

* Implement a variant of uncompress.el or jka-compr.el that works with
  GNU Privacy Guard for encryption.  [Code exists but isn't assigned.]

* Save undo information in files, and reload it when needed
  for undoing.

* Merge the Emacs regex.c with the Glibc regex.c.
  They split off a few years ago through negligence.

* Change the Windows NT menu code
  so that it handles the deep_p argument and avoids
  regenerating the whole menu bar menu tree except
  when the user tries to use the menubar.

  This requires the RIT to forward the WM_INITMENU message to
  the main thread, and not return from that message until the main
  thread has processed the MENU_BAR_ACTIVATE_EVENT and regenerated
  the whole menu bar.  In the mean time, it should process other messages.

* Get some major packages installed: W3/url (development version needs
  significant work), PSGML, Mule-UCS.  Check the assignments file for other
  packages which might go in and have been missed.

* Make keymaps a first-class Lisp object (this means a rewrite of
  keymap.c).  What should it do apart from being opaque ?
  multiple inheritance ?  faster where-is ?  no more fix_submap_inheritance ?
  what else ?

* Provide real menus on ttys.  The MS-DOS implementation can serve as
  an example how to do part of this.

* Implement popular parts of the rest of the CL functions as compiler
  macros in cl-macs.

* Highlight rectangles (`mouse-track-rectangle-p' in XEmacs).  Already in CUA,
  but it's a valuable feature worth making more general.

* Support simultaneous tty and X frames.

* Provide MIME support for Rmail using the Gnus MIME library.  [Maybe
  not now feasible, given Gnus maintenance decisions.  fx looked at
  this and can say where some of the problems are.]

* Eliminate the storm of warnings concerning char/unsigned char
  mismatches that we get with proprietary compilers on various systems.
  They make it difficult to spot the important warnings.

* Fix anything necessary to use `long long' EMACS_INTs with GCC.

* Split out parts of lisp.h and generate Makefile dependencies
  automatically.

* Update the FAQ.

* Make update-game-score work on systems that don't have strerror and difftime.

* Allow auto-compression-mode to use zlib calls if zlib is available.
  [It's required for PNG, so may be linked anyhow.]

* Add a --pristine startup flag which does -q --no-site-file plus
  ignoring X resources (Doze equivalents?) and most of the
  environment.  What should not be ignored needs consideration.

* Investigate using the language environment (or locale?) to set up
  more things, such as the default Ispell dictionary, calendar
  holidays, quoting characters?,...

* Improve the GC (generational, incremental).  (We may be able to use
  the Boehm collector.)  [fx is working on this.]

* Check what hooks would help Emacspeak -- see the defadvising in W3.

* Implement some variety of (non-gtk) drag-and-drop support under X.
  Using libdnd might be a good start.

* Add horizontal scroll bars.

* Provide an optional feature which computes a scroll bar slider's
  size and its position from lines instead of characters.

* Make the Custom themes support do useful things.

* Adapt the gnuserv/gnudoit features for server/emacsclient.

* Investigate using GNU Lightning or similar system for incremental
  compilation of selected bytecode functions to subrs.  Converting CCL
  programs to native code is probably the first thing to try, though.

* Add a feature to Info similar to "info --apropos SUBJECT".

* Add support for SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) rendering to
  Emacs.

* Allow unknown image types to be rendered via an external program
  converting them to, say, PBM (in the same way as PostScript?).

* Allow displaying an X window from an external program in a buffer,
  e.g. to render graphics from Java applets.  [gerd and/or wmperry
  thought this was feasible.]

* Allow images (not just text) in the margin to be mouse-sensitive.
  (Requires recursing through display properties).  Provide some way
  to simulate mouse-clicks on marginal text without a mouse.

* Implement Lisp functions to determine properly whether a character
  is displayable (particularly needed in XFree 4, sigh).  Use it to
  define useful glyphs that may be displayed as images or unicodes
  (with ASCIIfied fallback via latin1-disp).  Examples include
  box-drawing graphics in Custom buffers, W3 rules and tables, and
  tree displays generally, mode-line mail indicator.  [See work done
  already for Emacs 22 and consult fx.]

* Do something to make rms happy with fx's dynamic loading, and use it
  to implement things like auto-loaded buffer parsers and database
  access in cases which need more than Lisp.

* Extend ps-print to deal with multiple font sizes, images, and extra
  encodings.

* Provide portable undumping using mmap (per gerd design).

* Replace gmalloc.c with the modified Doug Lea code from the current
  GNU libc so that the special mmapping of buffers can be removed --
  that apparently loses under Solaris, at least.  [fx has mostly done
  this.]

* Use the XIE X extension, if available, for image display.

* Make monochrome images display using the foreground and background
  colors of the applicable faces.

* Add support for rendering antialiased text, probably using
  XRender/Freetype.

* Rewrite make-docfile to be clean and maintainable.

* Port the conservative stack marking code of Emacs' garbage collector
  to more systems, so that we can completely get rid of GCPROs.

* Reorder defcustom's in each package so that the more important
  options come first in the Customize buffers.  This could be done by
  either rearranging the file (since options are shown in the order
  they appear in the *.el files), or by adding a few :set-after
  attributes.

* Maybe document the features of libraries missing from the manual (or
  ancillary manuals, including the Lisp manual in some cases).
  This is not worth doing for all of these packages and we need not
  aim for completeness, but some may be worth documenting.

  Here's a list which is probably not complete/correct: align, allout,
  artist, ansi-color, array, battery, calculator, cdl, cmuscheme,
  completion, cua, delim-col, dirtrack, double, echistory, elide-head,
  easymenu, expand, flow-ctrl, format [format-alist],
  generic/generic-x [various modes], kermit, log-edit, ledit
  [obsolete?], makesum, midnight [other than in Kill Buffer node],
  mouse-copy [?], mouse-drag, mouse-sel, net-utils, rcompile,
  snmp-mode [?], soundex [should be interactive?], strokes [start from
  the web page], talk, thingatpt [interactive functions?], type-break,
  vcursor, xscheme, zone-mode [?], mlconvert [?], iso-cvt, iso-swed,
  swedish, feedmail [?], uce, bruce, gametree, meese, page-ext,
  refbib, refer, scribe, sgml-mode, spell, texinfo, underline,
  cmacexp, hideif, mantemp [obsolete?], pcomplete, assoc, xml,
  cvs-status (should be described in PCL-CVS manual); other progmodes,
  probably in separate manual.

* Provide a means to extract image-relative coordinates from mouse
  clicks on images.  (Needed for W3, at least.)  Also useful for W3
  and Gnus: allow images to scroll properly.

* Convert the XPM bitmaps to PPM, replace the PBMs with them and scrap
  the XPMs so that the colour versions work generally.  (Requires care
  with the colour used for the transparent regions.)

* Convenient access to the `values' variable.  It would be nice to have an
  interface that would show you the printed reps of the elements of the
  list in a menu, let you select one of the values, and put it into some
  other variable, without changing the value of `values'.

* Fix skip-chars-{for,back}ward to allow character classes.