* etc/TODO: Adjust entry about bug reporting.
[bpt/emacs.git] / etc / TODO
1 Emacs TODO List -*-outline-*-
2
3 Copyright (C) 2001-2013 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
4 See the end of the file for license conditions.
5
6
7 If you are ready to start working on any of these TODO items, we
8 appreciate your help; please write to emacs-devel@gnu.org so we can be
9 aware that the problem is being addressed, and talk with you how to do
10 it best. Also to check that it hasn't been done already, since we
11 don't always remember to update this file! It is best to consult
12 the latest version of this file in the Emacs source code repository.
13
14 Since Emacs is an FSF-copyrighted package, please be prepared to sign
15 legal papers to transfer the copyright on your work to the FSF.
16 For more details on this, see the section "Copyright Assignment"
17 in etc/CONTRIBUTE. That file also contains some more practical
18 details about getting involved.
19
20 As well as the issues listed here, there are bug reports at
21 <http://debbugs.gnu.org>. Bugs tagged "easy" ought to be suitable for
22 beginners to work on, but unfortunately we are not very good at using
23 this tag. Bugs tagged "help" are ones where assistance is required,
24 but may be difficult to fix. Bugs with severity "important" or higher
25 are the ones we consider more important, but these also may be
26 difficult to fix. Bugs with severity "minor" may be simpler, but this
27 is not always true.
28
29 * Tentative plan for Emacs-24
30
31 ** concurrency: including it as an "experimental" compile-time option
32 sounds good. Of course there might still be big questions around
33 "which form of concurrency" we'll want.
34 ** Overhaul of customize: sounds wonderful.
35 ** better support for dynamic embedded graphics: I like this idea (my
36 mpc.el code could use it for the volume widget), though I wonder if the
37 resulting efficiency will be sufficient.
38 ** Spread Semantic.
39 ** Improve the "code snippets" support: consolidate skeleton.el, tempo.el,
40 and expand.el (any other?) and then advertise/use/improve it.
41 ** Improve VC: yes, there's a lot of work to be done there :-(
42
43 ** Random things that cross my mind right now that I'd like to see (some of
44 them from my local hacks), but it's not obvious at all whether they'll
45 make it.
46 *** multiple inheritance for keymaps (to get rid of the
47 fix_submap_inheritance hack and to more cleanly express the
48 relationship between minibuffer-local-*-map): I've had this locally
49 for a long time, but the details of the semantics is somewhat ... delicate.
50 *** prog-mode could/should provide a better fill-paragraph default
51 that uses syntax-tables to recognize string/comment boundaries.
52 *** provide more completion-at-point-functions. Make existing
53 in-buffer completion use completion-at-point.
54 *** "functional" function-key-map that would make it easy to add (and
55 remove) mappings like "FOO-mouse-4 -> FOO-scroll-down",
56 "FOO-tab -> ?\FOO-\t", "uppercase -> lowercase", "[fringe KEY...] ->
57 [KEY]", "H-FOO -> M-FOO", "C-x C-y FOO -> H-FOO", ...
58
59
60 * Simple tasks. These don't require much Emacs knowledge, they are
61 suitable for anyone from beginners to experts.
62
63 ** Convert modes that use view-mode to be derived from special-mode instead.
64
65 ** Major modes should have a menu entry. Examples of modes that do
66 not have one at the moment and probably should: text-mode, inferior-lisp-mode.
67
68 ** Check if all items on the mode-line have a suitable tooltip for all modes.
69
70 ** edebug and debugger-mode should have a toolbar.
71 It can use the same icons as gud.
72
73 ** Check what minor modes don't use define-minor-mode and convert them
74 to use it.
75
76 ** Convert all defvars with leading `*' in the doc-strings into defcustoms
77 of appropriate :type and :group.
78
79 ** Remove any leading `*'s from defcustom doc-strings. [done?]
80
81 ** Remove unnecessary autoload cookies from defcustoms.
82 This needs a bit of care, since often people have become used to
83 expecting such variables to always be defined, eg when they modify
84 things in their .emacs.
85
86 ** See if other files can use generated-autoload-file (see eg ps-print).
87
88 ** Write more tests. Pick a fixed bug from the database, write a test
89 case to make sure it stays fixed. Or pick your favorite programming
90 major-mode, and write a test for its indentation. Or a version
91 control backend, and write a test for its status parser. Etc.
92 See test/automated for examples.
93
94 * Small but important fixes needed in existing features:
95
96 ** Flymake's customization mechanism needs to be both simpler (fewer
97 levels of indirection) and better documented, so it is easier to
98 understand. I find it quite hard to figure out what compilation
99 command it will use.
100
101 I suggest totally rewriting that part of Flymake, using the simplest
102 mechanism that suffices for the specific needs. That will be easy
103 for users to customize.
104
105 ** Compute the list of active keymaps *after* reading the first event.
106
107 ** Distribute a bar cursor of width > 1 evenly between the two glyphs
108 on each side of the bar (what to do at the edges?).
109
110 ** revert-buffer should eliminate overlays and the mark.
111 For related problems consult the thread starting with
112 http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2005-11/msg01346.html
113
114 ** erase-buffer should perhaps disregard read-only properties of text.
115
116 ** Fix the kill/yank treatment of invisible text. At the moment,
117 invisible text is placed in the kill-ring, so that the contents of
118 the ring may not correspond to the text as displayed to the user.
119 It ought to be possible to omit text which is invisible (due to a
120 text-property, overlay, or selective display) from the kill-ring.
121
122 ** Change the way define-minor-mode handles autoloading.
123 It should not generate :require. Or :require in defcustom
124 should not be recorded in the user's custom-set-variables call.
125
126 ** Feature to change cursor shape when Emacs is idle (for more than
127 a specified time).
128
129 ** The buttons at the top of a custom buffer should not omit
130 variables whose values are currently hidden.
131
132 ** Clean up the variables in browse-url. Perhaps use a shell command string to
133 specify the browser instead of the mushrooming set of functions.
134 See also ESR's proposal for a BROWSER environment variable
135 <URL:http://www.catb.org/~esr/BROWSER/browse-url.patch>.
136
137 ** Enhance scroll-bar to handle tall line (similar to line-move).
138
139 ** In Custom buffers, put the option that turns a mode on or off first,
140 using a heuristic of some kind?
141
142 ** Define recompute-arg and recompute-arg-if for fix_command to use.
143 See rms message of 11 Dec 05.
144
145 ** Height returned by frame-parameter ... and height given to
146 make-frame does not mean the same thing. The former includes menu and
147 tool bar lines, the latter don't. frame-parameter should return height
148 without menu and tool bar lines.
149
150 ** In Emacs Info, examples of using Customize should be clickable
151 and they should create Custom buffers.
152
153 ** The toolbar should show keyboard equivalents in its tooltips.
154
155 ** Add function to redraw the tool bar.
156
157 ** Redesign the load-history data structure so it can cope better
158 with evaluating definitions of the same function from different files,
159 recording which file the latest definition came from.
160
161 ** make back_comment use syntax-ppss or equivalent.
162
163 ** Consider improving src/sysdep.c's search for a fqdn.
164 http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2007-04/msg00782.html
165
166 ** Find a proper fix for rcirc multiline nick adding.
167 http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2007-04/msg00684.html
168
169 ** Implement `network-interface-list' and `network-interface-info'
170 on MS-Windows. Hint: the information is present in the Registry,
171 under the keys
172 HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip\Linkage\
173 and
174 HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\<device>\
175 where <device> is the network device found under the first key.
176
177 ** Check for any included packages that define obsolete bug-reporting commands.
178 Change them to use report-emacs-bug.
179 *** Related functions:
180 **** gnus-bug
181 **** report-calc-bug
182 **** org-submit-bug-report
183 **** lm-report-bug
184 **** tramp-bug
185 **** c-submit-bug-report
186 **** ffap-bug and ffap-submit-bug (obsoleted)
187 [Do all of them need changing?]
188
189 ** Allow fringe indicators to display a tooltip (provide a help-echo property?)
190
191 ** Add a defcustom that supplies a function to name numeric backup files,
192 like make-backup-file-name-function for non-numeric backup files.
193
194 ** `dired-mode' should specify the semantics of `buffer-modified-p' for
195 dired buffers and DTRT WRT `auto-revert-mode'.
196
197 ** Check uses of prin1 for error-handling.
198 http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2008-08/msg00456.html
199
200 * Important features:
201 ** Extended text-properties (to make overlays "obsolete")
202 *** Several text-property planes
203 This would get us rid of font-lock-face property (and I'd be happy to
204 get rid of char-property-alias-alist as well) since font-lock would
205 simply use the `face' property in the `font-lock' plane.
206 Each property would come with an Elisp merge-function. The merge
207 would be performed in add-text-properties.
208 *** zero-width text-properties.
209 ** Having tabs above a window to switch buffers in it.
210
211 ** "Perspectives" are named persistent window configurations. We have
212 had the window configuration mechanism in GNU Emacs since the
213 beginning but we have never developed a good user interface to take
214 advantage of them. Eclipse's user interface seems to be good.
215
216 Perspectives work well even if you do the equivalent of C-x 4 C-f
217 because of the distinction between view windows vs file windows. In
218 Emacs this is more or less the "dedicated window" feature, but we have
219 never really made it work for this.
220
221 Perspectives also need to interact with the tabs.
222
223 ** Imenu could be extended into a file-structure browsing mechanism
224 using code like that of customize-groups.
225
226 ** Display something in the margin on lines that have compilation errors.
227
228 ** Compilation error navigation bar, parallel to the scroll bar,
229 indicating where in the buffer there are compilation errors.
230 Perhaps we could arrange to display these error indications on top
231 of the scroll bar itself. That depends on to what extent toolkit
232 scroll bars are extensible.
233
234 ** Provide user-friendly ways to list all available font families,
235 list fonts, display a font as a sample, etc. [fx is looking at
236 multilingual font selection for the Unicode branch of Emacs.]
237
238 ** Provide a convenient way to select a color with the mouse.
239
240 ** Rewrite the face code to be simpler, clearer and faster.
241
242 ** Program Enriched mode to read and save in RTF. [Is there actually a
243 decent single definition of RTF? Maybe see info at
244 http://latex2rtf.sourceforge.net/.] This task seems to be addressed
245 by http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/emacs-rtf/, which is still in
246 very early stages.
247
248 ** Implement primitive and higher-level functions to allow filling
249 properly with variable-pitch faces.
250
251 ** Implement a smoother vertical scroll facility, one that allows
252 C-v to scroll through a tall image. The primitive operations
253 posn-at-point and posn-at-x-y should now make it doable in elisp.
254
255 ** Implement intelligent search/replace, going beyond query-replace
256 (see http://groups.csail.mit.edu/uid/projects/clustering/chi04.pdf).
257
258 ** Implement other text formatting properties.
259 *** Footnotes that can appear either in place or at the end of the page.
260 *** text property that says "don't break line in middle of this".
261 Don't break the line between two characters that have the
262 same value of this property.
263 *** Discretionary hyphens that are not visible when they are at end of line.
264
265 ** Internationalize Emacs's messages.
266
267 ** Set up a facility to save backtraces when errors happen during
268 specified filters, specified timers, and specified hooks.
269
270 ** Install mmc@maruska.dyndns.org's no-flicker change.
271
272 ** Add a "current vertical pixel level" value that goes with point,
273 so that motion commands can also move through tall images.
274 This value would be to point as window-vscroll is to window-start.
275
276 ** Address internationalization of symbols names essentially
277 as documentation, e.g. in command names and Custom.
278
279 ** Make the Lucid menu widget display multilingual text. [This
280 probably needs to be done from actual Emacs buffers, either directly
281 in the menu or by rendering in an unmapped window and copying the
282 pixels. The current code assumes a specific locale; that isn't good
283 enough even if X can render the arbitrary text] [The gtk
284 port now displays multilingual text in menus, but only insofar as
285 Emacs can encode it as utf-8 and gtk can display the result.]
286 Maybe making Lucid menus work like Gtk's (i.e. just force utf-8) is good
287 enough now that Emacs can encode most chars into utf-8.
288
289 ** Remove the limitation that window and frame widths and heights can
290 be only full columns/lines.
291
292 ** The GNUstep port needs some serious attention, ideally from someone
293 familiar with GNUstep and Objective C.
294
295 * Other features we would like:
296
297 ** Allow frames(terminals) created by emacsclient to inherit their environment
298 from the emacsclient process.
299 ** Remove the default toggling behavior of minor modes when called from elisp
300 rather than interactively. This a trivial one-liner in easy-mode.el.
301
302 ** Give Tar mode all the features of Archive mode.
303
304 ** Create a category of errors called `process-error'
305 for some or all errors associated with using subprocesses.
306
307 ** Maybe reinterpret `parse-error' as a category of errors
308 and put some other errors under it.
309
310 ** A function to tell you the argument pattern of functions.
311 See `function-arity' in http://www.loveshack.ukfsn.org/emacs/fx-misc.el.
312
313 ** Make byte-compile warn when a doc string is too wide.
314
315 ** Make byte-optimization warnings issue accurate line numbers.
316
317 ** A function to check for customizable options that have been
318 set but not saved, and ask the user whether to save them.
319 This could go in kill-emacs-query-functions, to remind people
320 to save their changes. If the user says yes, show them
321 in a Custom buffer using customize-customized.
322
323 ** Record the sxhash of the default value for customized variables
324 and notify the user (maybe by adding a menu item or toolbar button,
325 as the detection can occur during autoload time) when the default
326 changes (meaning that new versions of the Lisp source with a changed
327 default value got installed) and offer ediff on the respective
328 customization buffers.
329
330 ** Emacs Lisp mode could put an overlay on the defun for every
331 function that has advice. The overlay could have `after-text' like
332 " [Function has advice]". It might look like (defun foo [Function
333 has advice] (x y) The overlay could also be a button that you could
334 use to view the advice.
335
336 ** Add a function to get the insertion-type of the markers in an overlay.
337
338 ** ange-ftp
339 *** understand sftp
340 This is hard to make work because sftp doesn't print status messages.
341
342 *** Use MLS for ange-ftp-insert-directory if a list of files is specified.
343
344 ** Ability to map a key, including all modified-combinations.
345 E.g map mouse-4 to wheel-up as well as M-mouse-4 -> M-wheel-up
346 M-C-mouse-4 -> M-C-wheel-up, H-S-C-M-s-double-mouse-4 ->
347 H-S-C-M-s-double-wheel-up, ...
348
349 ** Beefed-up syntax-tables.
350 *** recognize multi-character syntactic entities like `begin' and `end'.
351 *** nested string-delimiters (for PostScript's (foo(bar)baz) strings).
352 *** support for infix operators (with precedence).
353 *** support for the $ (paired delimiter) in parse-partial-sexp.
354 *** support for hook-chars whose effect on the parsing-state is specified
355 by elisp code. Thus a char could both close a string and open a comment
356 at the same time and do it in a context-sensitive way.
357 *** ability to add mode-specific data to the partial-parse-state.
358
359 ** Add a way to convert a keyboard macro to equivalent Lisp code.
360
361 ** Have a command suggestion help system that recognizes patterns
362 of commands which could be replaced with a simpler common command.
363 It should not make more than one suggestion per 10 minutes.
364
365 ** Add a way to define input methods by computing them (when first used)
366 from other input methods. Then redefine C-x 8 to use a
367 user-selected input method, with the default being the union of
368 latin-1-prefix and latin-1-postfix.
369
370 ** Switch the Windows port to using Unicode keyboard input (maybe).
371 Based on http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms633586.aspx,
372 this boils down to (1) calling RegisterClassW function to register
373 Emacs windows, and (2) modifying ALL system messages to use Unicode.
374 In particular, WM_CHAR messages, which result from keyboard input,
375 will then come in encoded in UTF-16.
376
377 One advantage of switching to Unicode is to toss encoded-kbd usage,
378 which will solve the problem with binding non-ASCII keys with modifiers.
379
380 Problem: using this on Windows 9x/ME requires installing the
381 Microsoft Layer for Unicode (MSLU), which might not implement all
382 the required functionality that is available built-in on Windows XP
383 and later. We should not make this change if it would pressure
384 users of unauthorized copies of older versions of Windows to
385 downgrade to versions that require activation.
386
387 ** Implement a clean way to use different major modes for
388 different parts of a buffer. This could be useful in editing
389 Bison input files, for instance, or other kinds of text
390 where one language is embedded in another language. See
391 http://www.loveshack.ukfsn.org/emacs/multi-mode.el and also
392 mmm-mode, as reference for approaches taken by others.
393
394 ** Arrange a way for an input method to return the first character
395 immediately, then replace it later. So that C-s a with
396 input method latin-1-postfix would immediately search for an a.
397
398 ** Give start-process the ability to direct standard-error
399 output to a different filter.
400
401 ** Make desktop.el save the "frame configuration" of Emacs (in some
402 useful sense).
403
404 ** Give desktop.el a feature to switch between different named desktops.
405
406 ** Add a cpio mode, more or less like tar mode.
407
408 ** Save undo information in special temporary files, and reload it
409 when needed for undoing. This could extend undo capacity.
410
411 ** Change the Windows NT menu code
412 so that it handles the deep_p argument and avoids
413 regenerating the whole menu bar menu tree except
414 when the user tries to use the menubar.
415
416 This requires the RIT to forward the WM_INITMENU message to
417 the main thread, and not return from that message until the main
418 thread has processed the MENU_BAR_ACTIVATE_EVENT and regenerated
419 the whole menu bar. In the mean time, it should process other messages.
420
421 ** Get some major packages installed: W3 (development version needs
422 significant work), PSGML, _possibly_ ECB.
423 http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2007-05/msg01493.html
424 Check the assignments file for other packages which might go in and
425 have been missed.
426
427 ** Make keymaps a first-class Lisp object (this means a rewrite of
428 keymap.c). What should it do apart from being opaque ?
429 multiple inheritance ? faster where-is ? no more fix_submap_inheritance ?
430 what else ?
431
432 ** Provide real menus on ttys. The MS-DOS implementation can serve as
433 an example how to do part of this; see the XMenu* functions on msdos.c.
434
435 ** Implement popular parts of the rest of the CL functions as compiler
436 macros in cl-macs. [Is this still relevant now that cl-lib exists?]
437
438 ** Make compiler warnings about functions that might be undefined at run time
439 smarter, so that they know which files are required by the file being
440 compiled and don't warn about functions defined in them.
441
442 ** Highlight rectangles (`mouse-track-rectangle-p' in XEmacs). Already in CUA,
443 but it's a valuable feature worth making more general.
444
445 ** Eliminate the storm of warnings concerning char/unsigned char
446 mismatches that we get with GCC 4.x and proprietary compilers on
447 various systems. They make it difficult to spot the important warnings.
448
449 ** Fix anything necessary to use `long long' EMACS_INTs with GCC.
450
451 ** Split out parts of lisp.h.
452
453 ** Update the FAQ.
454
455 ** Allow auto-compression-mode to use zlib calls if zlib is available.
456 [It's required for PNG, so may be linked anyhow.]
457
458 ** Add a --pristine startup flag which does -q --no-site-file plus
459 ignoring X resources (Doze equivalents?) and most of the
460 environment. What should not be ignored needs consideration.
461 [Do the existing -Q and -D cover this, or is more needed?]
462
463 ** Improve the GC (generational, incremental). (We may be able to use
464 the Boehm collector.) [See the Boehm-GC branch in CVS for work on this.]
465
466 ** Check what hooks would help Emacspeak -- see the defadvising in W3.
467
468 ** Add definitions for symbol properties, for documentation purposes.
469
470 ** Add horizontal scroll bars.
471
472 ** Provide an optional feature which computes a scroll bar slider's
473 size and its position from lines instead of characters.
474
475 ** Allow unknown image types to be rendered via an external program
476 converting them to, say, PBM (in the same way as PostScript?). [does
477 doc-view.el do this, or could it be extended to do this?
478 Does ImageMagick obsolete this idea?]
479
480 ** Allow displaying an X window from an external program in a buffer,
481 e.g. to render graphics from Java applets. [gerd and/or wmperry
482 thought this was feasible.]
483
484 ** Allow images (not just text) in the margin to be mouse-sensitive.
485 (Requires recursing through display properties). Provide some way
486 to simulate mouse-clicks on marginal text without a mouse.
487
488 ** Implement Lisp functions to determine properly whether a character
489 is displayable (particularly needed in XFree 4, sigh). Use it to
490 define useful glyphs that may be displayed as images or unicodes
491 (with ASCIIfied fallback via latin1-disp). Examples include
492 box-drawing graphics in Custom buffers, W3 rules and tables, and
493 tree displays generally, mode-line mail indicator. [See work done
494 already for Emacs 23 and consult fx.]
495
496 ** Do something to make rms happy with fx's dynamic loading, and use it
497 to implement things like auto-loaded buffer parsers and database
498 access in cases which need more than Lisp.
499
500 ** Extend ps-print to deal with multiple font sizes, images, and extra
501 encodings.
502
503 ** Provide portable undumping using mmap (per gerd design).
504
505 ** Make byte-compile avoid binding an expanded defsubst's args
506 when the body only calls primitives.
507
508 ** Use the XIE X extension, if available, for image display.
509
510 ** Make monochrome images display using the foreground and background
511 colors of the applicable faces.
512
513 ** Make `format-time-string' preserve text properties like `format'.
514
515 ** Optionally make the cursor a little thinner at the end of a line
516 or the end of the buffer.
517
518 ** Port the conservative stack marking code of Emacs' garbage collector
519 to more systems, so that we can completely get rid of GCPROs. Note
520 that Boehm garbage collector provides this.
521
522 ** Reorder defcustom's in each package so that the more important
523 options come first in the Customize buffers. This could be done by
524 either rearranging the file (since options are shown in the order
525 they appear in the *.el files), or by adding a few :set-after attributes.
526
527 ** Maybe document the features of libraries missing from the manual (or
528 ancillary manuals, including the Lisp manual in some cases).
529 This is not worth doing for all of these packages and we need not
530 aim for completeness, but some may be worth documenting.
531
532 Here's a list which is probably not complete/correct: align, allout,
533 artist, ansi-color, array, battery, calculator, cdl, cmuscheme,
534 completion, cua, delim-col, dirtrack, double, echistory, elide-head,
535 easymenu, expand, flow-ctrl, format [format-alist],
536 generic/generic-x [various modes], kermit, log-edit,
537 makesum, midnight [other than in Kill Buffer node],
538 mouse-copy [?], mouse-drag, mouse-sel, net-utils, rcompile,
539 snmp-mode [?], soundex [should be interactive?], strokes [start from
540 the web page], talk, thingatpt [interactive functions?], type-break,
541 vcursor, xscheme, zone-mode [?], mlconvert [?], iso-cvt,
542 feedmail [?], uce, gametree, meese, page-ext,
543 refbib, refer, scribe, sgml-mode, spell, texinfo, underline,
544 cmacexp, hideif, mantemp [obsolete?], pcomplete, xml,
545 cvs-status (should be described in PCL-CVS manual); other progmodes,
546 probably in separate manual.
547
548 ** Convert the XPM bitmaps to PPM, replace the PBMs with them and scrap
549 the XPMs so that the color versions work generally. (Requires care
550 with the color used for the transparent regions.)
551
552 ** Convenient access to the `values' variable. It would be nice to have an
553 interface that would show you the printed reps of the elements of the
554 list in a menu, let you select one of the values, and put it into some
555 other variable, without changing the value of `values'.
556
557 ** (Controlled by a flag) make open and close syntax match exactly,
558 i.e. `(' doesn't match `]'.
559
560 ** Specify parameter ID-FORMAT in all calls to `file-attributes' and
561 `directory-files-and-attributes' where attributes UID or GID are used.
562 Whenever possible, use value 'string.
563 When done, change meaning of default value from 'integer to 'string.
564 If value 'integer is used nowhere, remove the parameter ID-FORMAT from
565 the definition of `file-attributes' and `directory-files-and-attributes'
566 and from the calls.
567
568 ** Make language-info-alist customizable. Currently a user can customize
569 only the variable `current-language-environment'.
570
571 ** Improve language environment handling so that Emacs can fit
572 better to a users locale. Currently Emacs uses utf-8 language
573 environment for all utf-8 locales, thus a user in ja_JP.UTF-8 locale
574 are also put in utf-8 lang. env. In such a case, it is
575 better to use Japanese lang. env. but prefer utf-8 coding system.
576
577 ** Enhance locale handling: handle language, territory and charset
578 orthogonally and de-emphasize language environments. Use the locale
579 to set up more things, such as fontsets, the default Ispell
580 dictionary, diary format, calendar holidays and display, quoting
581 characters and phrase boundaries, sentence endings, collation for
582 sorting (at least for unicodes), HTTP Accept-language, patterns for
583 directory listings and compilation messages, yes-or-no replies,
584 common menu items when the toolkit supports it ... `locale-info'
585 needs extending for LC_COLLATE &c. [fx started on this.]
586
587 ** Eliminate the current restriction on header printing by ps-print.
588 Currently, a header can contain only single 1-byte charset in
589 addition to ASCII.
590
591 ** In ps-print, provide an user friendly interface to specify fonts.
592
593 ** Enhance word boundary detection for such a script that doesn't use
594 space at word boundary (e.g. Thai).
595
596 ** Implement interface programs with major Japanese conversion server
597 in lib-src so that they can be used from the input method
598 "japanese". Currently, most Japanese users are using external
599 packages (e.g. tamago, anthy) or an input method via XIM.
600
601 ** Let LEIM handle the Mode_switch key like XIM does (i.e. a toggle like C-\
602 but which can also be used as a modifier).
603
604 ** Improve Help buffers: Change the face of previously visited links (like
605 Info, but also with regard to namespace), and give the value of
606 lisp expressions, e.g auto-mode-alist, the right face.
607
608 ** Possibly make `list-holidays' eval items in the calendar-holidays variable.
609 See thread
610 <http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2006-02/msg01034.html>.
611 [rgm@gnu.org will look at this after 22.1]
612
613 ** Possibly make cal-dst use the system timezone database directly.
614 See thread
615 <http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-pretest-bug/2006-11/msg00060.html>
616
617 ** Possibly add a "close" button to the modeline.
618 The idea is to add an "X" of some kind, that when clicked deletes
619 the window associated with that modeline.
620 http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2007-09/msg02416.html
621
622 * Things to be done for specific packages or features
623
624 ** NeXTstep port
625
626 *** Bugs
627
628 **** The event loop does not redraw.
629 A problem is that redraw don't happen during resize,
630 because we can't break out from the NSapp loop during resize.
631 There was a special trick to detect mouse press in the lower right
632 corner and track mouse movements, but this did not work well, and was
633 not scalable to the new Lion "resize on every window edge" behavior.
634 [As of trunk r109635, 2012-08-15, the event loop no longer polls.]
635
636 **** (mouse-avoidance-mode 'banish) then minimize Emacs, will pop window back
637 up on top of all others
638
639 **** free_frame_resources, face colors
640
641 **** Numeric keysetting bug.
642
643 *** Mac-related
644
645 **** Open file:/// URLs.
646
647 **** Put frame autopositioning into C code somewhere -- if loc = same, offset.
648
649 **** Automap ctrl-mouse-1 to mouse-3.
650
651 **** Deal with Finder aliases somehow.
652
653 **** Ctrl-F2 won't pull up menus.
654
655 *** Other / Low Priority:
656
657 **** Better recognition of Unicode scripts / Greek / composition.
658
659 **** Undo for color-drag face customization.
660
661 ** Bidirectional editing
662
663 *** Support reordering structured text
664 Two important use cases: (1) comments and strings in program sources,
665 and (2) text with markup, like HTML or XML.
666
667 One idea is to invent a special text property that would instruct the
668 display engine to reorder only the parts of buffer text covered by
669 that property. The display engine will then push its state onto the
670 iterator stack, restrict the bidi iterator to accessing only the
671 portion of buffer text covered by the property, reorder the text, then
672 pop its state from stack and continue as usual. This will require
673 minor changes in the bidi_it structure.
674
675 This design requires Lisp-level code to put the text properties on the
676 relevant parts of the buffer text. That could be done using JIT
677 fontifications, or as a preliminary processing when the file is
678 visited. With HTML/XML, the code that puts text properties needs to
679 pay attention to the bidi directives embedded in the HTML/XML stream.
680
681 *** Allow the user to control the direction of the UI
682
683 **** Introduce user option to control direction of mode line.
684 One problem is the header line, which is produced by the same routines
685 as the mode line. While it makes sense to have the mode-line
686 direction controlled by a single global variable, header lines are
687 buffer-specific, so they need a separate treatment in this regard.
688
689 **** User options to control direction of menu bar and tool bar.
690 For the tool bar, it's relatively easy: set it.paragraph_embedding
691 in redisplay_tool_bar according to the user variable, and make
692 f->desired_tool_bar_string multibyte with STRING_SET_MULTIBYTE. Some
693 minor changes will be needed to set the right_box_line_p and
694 left_box_line_p flags correctly for the R2L tool bar.
695
696 However, it makes no sense to display the tool bar right to left if
697 the menu bar cannot be displayed in the same direction.
698
699 R2L menu bar is tricky for the same reasons as the mode line. In
700 addition, toolkit builds create their menu bars in toolkit-specific
701 parts of code, bypassing xdisp.c, so those parts need to be enhanced
702 with toolkit-specific code to display the menu bar right to left.
703
704 ** ImageMagick support
705
706 *** image-type-header-regexps priorities the jpeg loader over the
707 ImageMagick one. This is not wrong, but how should a user go about
708 preferring the ImageMagick loader? The user might like zooming etc in jpegs.
709
710 Try (setq image-type-header-regexps nil) for a quick hack to prefer
711 ImageMagick over the jpg loader.
712
713 *** For some reason its unbearably slow to look at a page in a large
714 image bundle using the :index feature. The ImageMagick "display"
715 command is also a bit slow, but nowhere near as slow as the Emacs
716 code. It seems ImageMagick tries to unpack every page when loading the
717 bundle. This feature is not the primary usecase in Emacs though.
718
719 ImageMagick 6.6.2-9 introduced a bugfix for single page djvu load. It
720 is now much faster to use the :index feature, but still not very fast.
721
722 *** Try to cache the num pages calculation. It can take a while to
723 calculate the number of pages, and if you need to do it for each page
724 view, page-flipping becomes uselessly slow.
725
726 *** Integrate with image-dired.
727
728 *** Integrate with docview.
729
730 *** Integrate with image-mode.
731 Some work has been done, e.g. M-x image-transform-fit-to-height will
732 fit the image to the height of the Emacs window.
733
734 *** Look for optimizations for handling images with low depth.
735 Currently the code seems to default to 24 bit RGB which is costly for
736 images with lower bit depth.
737
738 *** Decide what to do with some uncommitted imagemagick support
739 functions for image size etc.
740
741 ** nxml mode
742
743 *** High priority
744
745 **** Command to insert an element template, including all required
746 attributes and child elements. When there's a choice of elements
747 possible, we could insert a comment, and put an overlay on that
748 comment that makes it behave like a button with a pop-up menu to
749 select the appropriate choice.
750
751 **** Command to tag a region. With a schema should complete using legal
752 tags, but should work without a schema as well.
753
754 **** Provide a way to conveniently rename an element. With a schema should
755 complete using legal tags, but should work without a schema as well.
756
757 *** Outlining
758
759 **** Implement C-c C-o C-q.
760
761 **** Install pre/post command hook for moving out of invisible section.
762
763 **** Put a modify hook on invisible sections that expands them.
764
765 **** Integrate dumb folding somehow.
766
767 **** An element should be able to be its own heading.
768
769 **** Optimize to avoid complete buffer scan on each command.
770
771 **** Make it work with HTML-style headings (i.e. level indicated by
772 name of heading element rather than depth of section nesting).
773
774 **** Recognize root element as a section provided it has a title, even
775 if it doesn't match section-element-name-regex.
776
777 **** Support for incremental search automatically making hidden text visible.
778
779 **** Allow title to be an attribute.
780
781 **** Command that says to recognize the tag at point as a section/heading.
782
783 **** Explore better ways to determine when an element is a section
784 or a heading.
785
786 **** rng-next-error needs to either ignore invisible portion or reveal it
787 (maybe use isearch oriented text properties).
788
789 **** Errors within hidden section should be highlighted by underlining the
790 ellipsis.
791
792 **** Make indirect buffers work.
793
794 **** How should nxml-refresh outline recover from non well-formed tags?
795
796 **** Hide tags in title elements?
797
798 **** Use overlays instead of text properties for holding outline state?
799 Necessary for indirect buffers to work?
800
801 **** Allow an outline to go in the speedbar.
802
803 **** Split up outlining manual section into subsections.
804
805 **** More detail in the manual about each outlining command.
806
807 **** More menu entries for hiding/showing?
808
809 **** Indication of many lines have been hidden?
810
811 *** Locating schemas
812
813 **** Should rng-validate-mode give the user an opportunity to specify a
814 schema if there is currently none? Or should it at least give a hint
815 to the user how to specify a non-vacuous schema?
816
817 **** Support for adding new schemas to schema-locating files.
818 Add documentElement and namespace elements.
819
820 **** C-c C-w should be able to report current type id.
821
822 **** Implement doctypePublicId.
823
824 **** Implement typeIdBase.
825
826 **** Implement typeIdProcessingInstruction.
827
828 **** Support xml:base.
829
830 **** Implement group.
831
832 **** Find preferred prefix from schema-locating files. Get rid of
833 rng-preferred-prefix-alist.
834
835 **** Inserting document element with vacuous schema should complete using
836 document elements declared in schema locating files, and set schema
837 appropriately.
838
839 **** Add a ruleType attribute to the <include> element?
840
841 **** Allow processing instruction in prolog to contain the compact syntax
842 schema directly.
843
844 **** Use RDDL to locate a schema based on the namespace URI.
845
846 **** Should not prompt to add redundant association to schema locating file.
847
848 **** Command to reload current schema.
849
850 *** Schema-sensitive features
851
852 **** Should filter dynamic markup possibilities using schema validity, by
853 adding hook to nxml-mode.
854
855 **** Dynamic markup word should (at least optionally) be able to look in
856 other buffers that are using nxml-mode.
857
858 **** Should clicking on Invalid move to next error if already on an error?
859
860 **** Take advantage of a:documentation. Needs change to schema format.
861
862 **** Provide feasible validation (as in Jing) toggle.
863
864 **** Save the validation state as a property on the error overlay to enable
865 more detailed diagnosis.
866
867 **** Provide an Error Summary buffer showing all the validation errors.
868
869 **** Pop-up menu. What is useful? Tag a region (should be grayed out if
870 the region is not balanced). Suggestions based on error messages.
871
872 **** Have configurable list of namespace URIs so that we can provide
873 namespace URI completion on extension elements or with schema-less documents.
874
875 **** Allow validation to handle XInclude.
876
877 **** ID/IDREF support.
878
879 *** Completion
880
881 **** Make it work with icomplete. Only use a function to complete when
882 some of the possible names have undeclared namespaces.
883
884 **** How should C-return in mixed text work?
885
886 **** When there's a vacuous schema, C-return after < will insert the end-tag.
887 Is this a bug or a feature?
888
889 **** After completing start-tag, ensure we don't get unhelpful message
890 from validation
891
892 **** Syntax table for completion.
893
894 **** Should complete start-tag name with a space if namespace attributes
895 are required.
896
897 **** When completing start-tag name with no prefix and it doesn't match
898 should try to infer namespace from local name.
899
900 **** Should completion pay attention to characters after point? If so, how?
901
902 **** When completing start-tag name, add required atts if only one required
903 attribute.
904
905 **** When completing attribute name, add attribute value if only one value
906 is possible.
907
908 **** After attribute-value completion, insert space after close delimiter
909 if more attributes are required.
910
911 **** Complete on enumerated data values in elements.
912
913 **** When in context that allows only elements, should get tag
914 completion without having to type < first.
915
916 **** When immediately after start-tag name, and name is valid and not
917 prefix of any other name, should C-return complete on attribute names?
918
919 **** When completing attributes, more consistent to ignore all attributes
920 after point.
921
922 **** Inserting attribute value completions needs to be sensitive to what
923 delimiter is used so that it quotes the correct character.
924
925 **** Complete on encoding-names in XML decl.
926
927 **** Complete namespace declarations by searching for all namespaces
928 mentioned in the schema.
929
930 *** Well-formed XML support
931
932 **** Deal better with Mule-UCS
933
934 **** Deal with UTF-8 BOM when reading.
935
936 **** Complete entity names.
937
938 **** Provide some support for entity names for MathML.
939
940 **** Command to repeat the last tag.
941
942 **** Support for changing between character references and characters.
943 Need to check that context is one in which character references are
944 allowed. xmltok prolog parsing will need to distinguish parameter
945 literals from other kinds of literal.
946
947 **** Provide a comment command to bind to M-; that works better than the
948 normal one.
949
950 **** Make indenting in a multi-line comment work.
951
952 **** Structure view. Separate buffer displaying element tree.
953 Be able to navigate from structure view to document and vice-versa.
954
955 **** Flash matching >.
956
957 **** Smart selection command that selects increasingly large syntactically
958 coherent chunks of XML. If point is in an attribute value, first
959 select complete value; then if command is repeated, select value plus
960 delimiters, then select attribute name as well, then complete
961 start-tag, then complete element, then enclosing element, etc.
962
963 **** ispell integration.
964
965 **** Block-level items in mixed content should be indented, e.g:
966 <para>This is list:
967 <ul>
968 <li>item</li>
969
970 **** Provide option to indent like this:
971 <para>This is a paragraph
972 occupying multiple lines.</para>
973
974 **** Option to add make a / that closes a start-tag electrically insert a
975 space for the XHTML guys.
976
977 **** C-M-q should work.
978
979 *** Datatypes
980
981 **** Figure out workaround for CJK characters with regexps.
982
983 **** Does category C contain Cn?
984
985 **** Do ENTITY datatype properly.
986
987 *** XML Parsing Library
988
989 **** Parameter entity parsing option, nil (never), t (always),
990 unless-standalone (unless standalone="yes" in XML declaration).
991
992 **** When a file is currently being edited, there should be an option to
993 use its buffer instead of the on-disk copy.
994
995 *** Handling all XML features
996
997 **** Provide better support for editing external general parsed entities.
998 Perhaps provide a way to force ignoring undefined entities; maybe turn
999 this on automatically with <?xml encoding=""?> (with no version
1000 pseudo-att).
1001
1002 **** Handle internal general entity declarations containing elements.
1003
1004 **** Handle external general entity declarations.
1005
1006 **** Handle default attribute declarations in internal subset.
1007
1008 **** Handle parameter entities (including DTD).
1009
1010 *** RELAX NG
1011
1012 **** Do complete schema checking, at least optionally.
1013
1014 **** Detect include/external loops during schema parse.
1015
1016 **** Coding system detection for schemas. Should use utf-8/utf-16 per the
1017 spec. But also need to allow encodings other than UTF-8/16 to support
1018 CJK charsets that Emacs cannot represent in Unicode.
1019
1020 *** Catching XML errors
1021
1022 **** Check public identifiers.
1023
1024 **** Check default attribute values.
1025
1026 *** Performance
1027
1028 **** Explore whether overlay-recenter can cure overlays performance problems.
1029
1030 **** Cache schemas. Need to have list of files and mtimes.
1031
1032 **** Make it possible to reduce rng-validate-chunk-size significantly,
1033 perhaps to 500 bytes, without bad performance impact: don't do
1034 redisplay on every chunk; pass continue functions on other uses of
1035 rng-do-some-validation.
1036
1037 **** Cache after first tag.
1038
1039 **** Introduce a new name class that is a choice between names (so that
1040 we can use member)
1041
1042 **** intern-choice should simplify after patterns with same 1st/2nd args
1043
1044 **** Large numbers of overlays slow things down dramatically. Represent
1045 errors using text properties. This implies we cannot incrementally
1046 keep track of the number of errors, in order to determine validity.
1047 Instead, when validation completes, scan for any characters with an
1048 error text property; this seems to be fast enough even with large
1049 buffers. Problem with error at end of buffer, where there's no
1050 character; need special variable for this. Need to merge face from
1051 font-lock with the error face: use :inherit attribute with list of two
1052 faces. How do we avoid making rng-valid depend on nxml-mode?
1053
1054 *** Error recovery
1055
1056 **** Don't stop at newline in looking for close of start-tag.
1057
1058 **** Use indentation to guide recovery from mismatched end-tags
1059
1060 **** Don't keep parsing when currently not well-formed but previously
1061 well-formed
1062
1063 **** Try to recover from a bad start-tag by popping an open element if
1064 there was a mismatched end-tag unaccounted for.
1065
1066 **** Try to recover from a bad start-tag open on the hypothesis that there
1067 was an error in the namespace URI.
1068
1069 **** Better recovery from ill-formed XML declarations.
1070
1071 *** Usability improvements
1072
1073 **** Should print a "Parsing..." message during long movements.
1074
1075 **** Provide better position for reference to undefined pattern error.
1076
1077 **** Put Well-formed in the mode-line when validating against any-content.
1078
1079 **** Trim marking of illegal data for leading and trailing whitespace.
1080
1081 **** Show Invalid status as soon as we are sure it's invalid, rather than
1082 waiting for everything to be completely up to date.
1083
1084 **** When narrowed, Valid or Invalid status should probably consider only
1085 validity of narrowed region.
1086
1087 *** Bug fixes
1088
1089 **** Need to give an error for a document like: <foo/><![CDATA[ ]]>
1090
1091 **** Make nxml-forward-balanced-item work better for the prolog.
1092
1093 **** Make filling and indenting comments work in the prolog.
1094
1095 **** Should delete RNC Input buffers.
1096
1097 **** Figure out what regex use for NCName and use it consistently,
1098
1099 **** Should have not-well-formed tokens in ref.
1100
1101 **** Require version in XML declaration? Probably not because prevents
1102 use for external parsed entities. At least forbid standalone without version.
1103
1104 **** Reject schema that compiles to rng-not-allowed-ipattern.
1105
1106 **** Move point backwards on schema parse error so that it's on the right token.
1107
1108 *** Internal
1109
1110 **** Use rng-quote-string consistently.
1111
1112 **** Use parsing library for XML to texinfo conversion.
1113
1114 **** Rename xmltok.el to nxml-token.el. Use nxml-t- prefix instead of
1115 xmltok-. Change nxml-t-type to nxml-t-token-type, nxml-t-start to
1116 nxml-t-token-start.
1117
1118 **** Can we set fill-prefix to nil and rely on indenting?
1119
1120 **** xmltok should make available replacement text of entities containing
1121 elements
1122
1123 **** In rng-valid, instead of using modification-hooks and
1124 insert-behind-hooks on dependent overlays, use same technique as nxml-mode.
1125
1126 **** Port to XEmacs. Issues include: Unicode (XEmacs seems to be based on
1127 Mule-UCS); overlays/text properties vs extents; absence of
1128 fontification-functions hook.
1129
1130 *** Fontification
1131
1132 **** Allow face to depend on element qname, attribute qname, attribute
1133 value. Use list with pairs of (R . F), where R specifies regexps and
1134 F specifies faces. How can this list be made to depend on the document type?
1135
1136 *** Other
1137
1138 **** Support RELAX NG XML syntax (use XML parsing library).
1139
1140 **** Support W3C XML Schema (use XML parsing library).
1141
1142 **** Command to infer schema from current document (like trang).
1143
1144 *** Schemas
1145
1146 **** XSLT schema should take advantage of RELAX NG to express cooccurrence
1147 constraints on attributes (e.g. xsl:template).
1148
1149 *** Documentation
1150
1151 **** Move material from README to manual.
1152
1153 **** Document encodings.
1154
1155 *** Notes
1156
1157 **** How can we allow an error to be displayed on a different token from
1158 where it is detected? In particular, for a missing closing ">" we
1159 will need to display it at the beginning of the following token. At the
1160 moment, when we parse the following token the error overlay will get cleared.
1161
1162 **** How should rng-goto-next-error deal with narrowing?
1163
1164 **** Perhaps should merge errors having same start position even if they
1165 have different ends.
1166
1167 **** How to handle surrogates? One possibility is to be compatible with
1168 utf8.e: represent as sequence of 4 chars. But utf-16 is incompatible
1169 with this.
1170
1171 **** Should we distinguish well-formedness errors from invalidity errors?
1172 (I think not: we may want to recover from a bad start-tag by implying
1173 an end-tag.)
1174
1175 **** Seems to be a bug with Emacs, where a mouse movement that causes
1176 help-echo text to appear counts as pending input but does not cause
1177 idle timer to be restarted.
1178
1179 **** Use XML to represent this file.
1180
1181 **** I had a TODO which said simply "split-string". What did I mean?
1182
1183 **** Investigate performance on large files all on one line.
1184
1185 *** Issues for Emacs versions >= 22
1186
1187 **** Take advantage of UTF-8 CJK support.
1188
1189 **** Supply a next-error-function.
1190
1191 **** Investigate this NEWS item "Emacs now tries to set up buffer coding
1192 systems for HTML/XML files automatically."
1193
1194 **** Take advantage of the pointer text property.
1195
1196 **** Leverage char-displayable-p.
1197
1198 * Internal changes
1199
1200 ** Cleanup all the GC_ mark bit stuff -- there is no longer any distinction
1201 since the mark bit is no longer stored in the Lisp_Object itself.
1202
1203 ** Refine the `predicate' arg to read-file-name.
1204 Currently, it mixes up the predicate to apply when doing completion and the
1205 one to use when terminating the selection.
1206
1207 ** Merge ibuffer.el and buff-menu.el.
1208 More specifically do what's needed to make ibuffer.el the default,
1209 or just an extension of buff-menu.el.
1210
1211 ** Use pcomplete by default in shell-mode.
1212 This means to make it behave (by default) more like the current code.
1213 Use it also for read-shell-command, M-x compile, ...
1214
1215 ** Merge sendmail.el and messages.el.
1216 Probably not a complete merge, but at least arrange for messages.el to be
1217 a derived mode of sendmail.el. Or arrange for messages.el to be split
1218 into a small core and "the rest" so that we use less resources as long as
1219 we stick to the features provided in sendmail.el.
1220
1221 ** Replace gmalloc.c with the modified Doug Lea code from the current
1222 GNU libc so that the special mmapping of buffers can be removed --
1223 that apparently loses under Solaris, at least. [fx has mostly done
1224 this.]
1225
1226 ** Rewrite make-docfile to be clean and maintainable.
1227 It might be better to replace it with Lisp, using the byte compiler.
1228 http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2012-06/msg00037.html
1229
1230 ** Add an inferior-comint-minor-mode to capture the common set of operations
1231 offered by major modes that offer an associated inferior
1232 comint-derived mode. I.e. basically make cmuscheme.el/inf-lisp.el generic.
1233 For use by sml-mode, python-mode, tex-mode, scheme-mode, lisp-mode,
1234 haskell-mode, tuareg-mode, ...
1235
1236 ** Add "link" button class
1237 Add a standard button-class named "link", and make all other link-like
1238 button classes inherit from it. Set the default face of the "link" button
1239 class to the standard "link" face.
1240
1241 * Wishlist items:
1242
1243 ** Maybe replace etags.c with a Lisp implementation.
1244 http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2012-06/msg00354.html
1245
1246 ** Maybe replace lib-src/rcs2log with a Lisp implementation.
1247 It wouldn't have to be a complete replacement, just enough
1248 for vc-rcs-update-changelog.
1249
1250 * Other known bugs:
1251
1252 ** `make-frame' forgets unhandled parameters, at least for X11 frames.
1253
1254 ** a two-char comment-starter whose two chars are symbol constituents will
1255 not be noticed if it appears within a word.
1256
1257 ** Fix unexelf.c to handle the .data.rel and .data.rel.local
1258 sections made by GCC 3.4 on IRIX.
1259
1260 \f
1261 This file is part of GNU Emacs.
1262
1263 GNU Emacs is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
1264 it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
1265 the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
1266 (at your option) any later version.
1267
1268 GNU Emacs is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
1269 but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
1270 MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
1271 GNU General Public License for more details.
1272
1273 You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
1274 along with GNU Emacs. If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.