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 * Move fringe to be displayed between display margins and text area.
  67   [KFS is looking into this].
  68
  69 * Set fringe widths per-window/per-buffer.
  70
  71 * Make fringe bitmaps user configurable.  Maybe add ability to add
  72   additional bitmaps to the fringe from lisp.
  73
  74 Other features we would like:
  75
  76 * Have a command suggestion help system that recognizes patterns
  77   of commands which could be replaced with a simpler common command.
  78   It should not make more than one suggestion per 10 minutes.
  79
  80 * Add a way to define input methods by computing them (when first used)
  81   from other input methods.  Then redefine C-x 8 to use a
  82   user-selected input method, with the default being the union of
  83   latin-1-prefix and latin-1-postfix.
  84
  85 * Implement a clean way to use different major modes for
  86   different parts of a buffer.
  87
  88 * Give start-process the ability to direct standard-error
  89   output to a different filter.
  90
  91 * Make desktop.el save the "frame configuration" of Emacs (in some
  92   useful sense).
  93
  94 * Give desktop.el a feature to switch between different named
  95   desktops.
  96
  97 * Replace finder.el with something that generates an Info file
  98   which gives the same information through a menu structure.  [Dave
  99   Love started on this.]
 100
 101 * Implement a variant of uncompress.el or jka-compr.el that works with
 102   GNU Privacy Guard for encryption.  [Code exists but isn't assigned.
 103   See the Gnus development sources for assigned code concerning GPG
 104   use with mail, which is probably a good start.]
 105
 106 * Save undo information in files, and reload it when needed
 107   for undoing.
 108
 109 * Merge the Emacs regex.c with the Glibc regex.c.
 110   They split off a few years ago through negligence.
 111
 112 * Change the Windows NT menu code
 113   so that it handles the deep_p argument and avoids
 114   regenerating the whole menu bar menu tree except
 115   when the user tries to use the menubar.
 116
 117   This requires the RIT to forward the WM_INITMENU message to
 118   the main thread, and not return from that message until the main
 119   thread has processed the MENU_BAR_ACTIVATE_EVENT and regenerated
 120   the whole menu bar.  In the mean time, it should process other messages.
 121
 122 * Get some major packages installed: W3/url (development version needs
 123   significant work), PSGML.  Check the assignments file for other
 124   packages which might go in and have been missed.
 125
 126 * Make keymaps a first-class Lisp object (this means a rewrite of
 127   keymap.c).  What should it do apart from being opaque ?
 128   multiple inheritance ?  faster where-is ?  no more fix_submap_inheritance ?
 129   what else ?
 130
 131 * Provide real menus on ttys.  The MS-DOS implementation can serve as
 132   an example how to do part of this.
 133
 134 * Implement popular parts of the rest of the CL functions as compiler
 135   macros in cl-macs.
 136
 137 * Highlight rectangles (`mouse-track-rectangle-p' in XEmacs).  Already in CUA,
 138   but it's a valuable feature worth making more general.
 139
 140 * Support simultaneous tty and X frames.
 141
 142 * Provide MIME support for Rmail using the Gnus MIME library.  [Maybe
 143   not now feasible, given Gnus maintenance decisions.  fx looked at
 144   this and can say where some of the problems are.]
 145
 146 * Eliminate the storm of warnings concerning char/unsigned char
 147   mismatches that we get with proprietary compilers on various systems.
 148   They make it difficult to spot the important warnings.
 149
 150 * Fix anything necessary to use `long long' EMACS_INTs with GCC.
 151
 152 * Split out parts of lisp.h and generate Makefile dependencies
 153   automatically.
 154
 155 * Update the FAQ.
 156
 157 * Allow auto-compression-mode to use zlib calls if zlib is available.
 158   [It's required for PNG, so may be linked anyhow.]
 159
 160 * Add a --pristine startup flag which does -q --no-site-file plus
 161   ignoring X resources (Doze equivalents?) and most of the
 162   environment.  What should not be ignored needs consideration.
 163
 164 * Investigate using the language environment (or locale?) to set up
 165   more things, such as the default Ispell dictionary, calendar
 166   holidays, quoting characters?,...
 167
 168 * Improve the GC (generational, incremental).  (We may be able to use
 169   the Boehm collector.)  [See the Boehm-GC branch in CVS for work on
 170   this.]
 171
 172 * Check what hooks would help Emacspeak -- see the defadvising in W3.
 173
 174 * Implement some variety of (non-gtk) drag-and-drop support under X.
 175   Using libdnd might be a good start.
 176
 177 * Add horizontal scroll bars.
 178
 179 * Provide an optional feature which computes a scroll bar slider's
 180   size and its position from lines instead of characters.
 181
 182 * Make the Custom themes support do useful things.
 183
 184 * Investigate using GNU Lightning or similar system for incremental
 185   compilation of selected bytecode functions to subrs.  Converting CCL
 186   programs to native code is probably the first thing to try, though.
 187
 188 * Add a feature to Info similar to "info --apropos SUBJECT".
 189
 190 * Add support for SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) rendering to
 191   Emacs.
 192
 193 * Allow unknown image types to be rendered via an external program
 194   converting them to, say, PBM (in the same way as PostScript?).
 195
 196 * Allow displaying an X window from an external program in a buffer,
 197   e.g. to render graphics from Java applets.  [gerd and/or wmperry
 198   thought this was feasible.]
 199
 200 * Allow images (not just text) in the margin to be mouse-sensitive.
 201   (Requires recursing through display properties).  Provide some way
 202   to simulate mouse-clicks on marginal text without a mouse.
 203
 204 * Implement Lisp functions to determine properly whether a character
 205   is displayable (particularly needed in XFree 4, sigh).  Use it to
 206   define useful glyphs that may be displayed as images or unicodes
 207   (with ASCIIfied fallback via latin1-disp).  Examples include
 208   box-drawing graphics in Custom buffers, W3 rules and tables, and
 209   tree displays generally, mode-line mail indicator.  [See work done
 210   already for Emacs 22 and consult fx.]
 211
 212 * Do something to make rms happy with fx's dynamic loading, and use it
 213   to implement things like auto-loaded buffer parsers and database
 214   access in cases which need more than Lisp.
 215
 216 * Extend ps-print to deal with multiple font sizes, images, and extra
 217   encodings.
 218
 219 * Provide portable undumping using mmap (per gerd design).
 220
 221 * Replace gmalloc.c with the modified Doug Lea code from the current
 222   GNU libc so that the special mmapping of buffers can be removed --
 223   that apparently loses under Solaris, at least.  [fx has mostly done
 224   this.]
 225
 226 * Use the XIE X extension, if available, for image display.
 227
 228 * Make monochrome images display using the foreground and background
 229   colors of the applicable faces.
 230
 231 * Add support for rendering antialiased text, probably using
 232   XRender/Freetype.
 233
 234 * Rewrite make-docfile to be clean and maintainable.
 235
 236 * Port the conservative stack marking code of Emacs' garbage collector
 237   to more systems, so that we can completely get rid of GCPROs.
 238
 239 * Reorder defcustom's in each package so that the more important
 240   options come first in the Customize buffers.  This could be done by
 241   either rearranging the file (since options are shown in the order
 242   they appear in the *.el files), or by adding a few :set-after
 243   attributes.
 244
 245 * Maybe document the features of libraries missing from the manual (or
 246   ancillary manuals, including the Lisp manual in some cases).
 247   This is not worth doing for all of these packages and we need not
 248   aim for completeness, but some may be worth documenting.
 249
 250   Here's a list which is probably not complete/correct: align, allout,
 251   artist, ansi-color, array, battery, calculator, cdl, cmuscheme,
 252   completion, cua, delim-col, dirtrack, double, echistory, elide-head,
 253   easymenu, expand, flow-ctrl, format [format-alist],
 254   generic/generic-x [various modes], kermit, log-edit, ledit
 255   [obsolete?], makesum, midnight [other than in Kill Buffer node],
 256   mouse-copy [?], mouse-drag, mouse-sel, net-utils, rcompile,
 257   snmp-mode [?], soundex [should be interactive?], strokes [start from
 258   the web page], talk, thingatpt [interactive functions?], type-break,
 259   vcursor, xscheme, zone-mode [?], mlconvert [?], iso-cvt, iso-swed,
 260   swedish, feedmail [?], uce, bruce, gametree, meese, page-ext,
 261   refbib, refer, scribe, sgml-mode, spell, texinfo, underline,
 262   cmacexp, hideif, mantemp [obsolete?], pcomplete, assoc, xml,
 263   cvs-status (should be described in PCL-CVS manual); other progmodes,
 264   probably in separate manual.
 265
 266 * Provide a means to extract image-relative coordinates from mouse
 267   clicks on images.  (Needed for W3, at least.)  Also useful for W3
 268   and Gnus: allow images to scroll properly.
 269
 270 * Convert the XPM bitmaps to PPM, replace the PBMs with them and scrap
 271   the XPMs so that the colour versions work generally.  (Requires care
 272   with the colour used for the transparent regions.)
 273
 274 * Convenient access to the `values' variable.  It would be nice to have an
 275   interface that would show you the printed reps of the elements of the
 276   list in a menu, let you select one of the values, and put it into some
 277   other variable, without changing the value of `values'.
 278
 279 * Fix skip-chars-{for,back}ward to allow character classes.
 280
 281 * (Controlled by a flag) make open and close syntax match exactly,
 282   i.e. `(' doesn't match `]'.
 283
 284 ;;; arch-tag: b0a3e40b-726a-457d-9999-ba848321b036