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
10 * Small but important fixes needed in existing features:
12 ** Fix the kill/yank treatment of invisible text. At the moment,
13 invisible text is placed in the kill-ring, so that the contents of
14 the ring may not correspond to the text as displayed to the user. It
15 ought to be possible to omit text which is invisible (due to a
16 text-property, overlay, or selective display) from the kill-ring.
20 ** Provide user-friendly ways to list all available font families,
21 display a font as a sample, etc. [fx is looking at multilingual
22 font selection for Emacs 22.]
24 ** Program Enriched mode to read and save in RTF. [Is there actually a
25 decent single definition of RTF? Maybe see info at
26 http://latex2rtf.sourceforge.net/.]
28 ** Implement something better than the current Refill mode. This
29 probably needs some primitive support.
31 ** Implement primitive and higher-level functions to allow filling
32 properly with variable-pitch faces.
34 ** Implement a smoother vertical scroll facility, one that allows
35 C-v to scroll through a tall image. The primitive operations
36 posn-at-point and posn-at-x-y should now make it doable in elisp.
38 ** Implement intelligent search/replace, going beyond query-replace
39 (see http://graphics.csail.mit.edu/~rcm/chi04.pdf).
41 ** Implement other text formatting properties.
42 *** Footnotes that can appear either in place or at the end of the page.
43 *** text property that says "don't break line in middle of this".
44 Don't break the line between two characters that have the
45 same value of this property.
46 *** Discretionary hyphens that are not visible when they are at end of line.
48 ** Make movemail work with IMAP.
50 ** Internationalize Emacs's messages. [Note that this is of limited
51 use until the menus can display multilingual text. It also doesn't
52 address important issues like using the names of symbols essentially
53 as documentation, e.g. in command names and Custom. -- fx]
55 ** Make the Lucid menu widget display multilingual text. [This
56 probably needs to be done from actual Emacs buffers, either directly
57 in the menu or by rendering in an unmapped window and copying the
58 pixels. Note that the relevant Xlib functions assume a specific
59 locale; that isn't good enough even if X can render the arbitrary
60 text, which it often can't as far as I can tell. -- fx] [The gtk
61 port now displays multilingual text in menus, but only insofar as
62 Emacs can encode it as utf-8 and gtk can display the result.]
64 ** Remove the limitation that window and frame widths and heights can
65 be only full columns/lines.
67 * Other features we would like:
71 *** Use MLS for ange-ftp-insert-directory if a list of files is specified.
73 ** Ability to map a key, including all modified-combinations.
74 E.g map mouse-4 to wheel-up as well as M-mouse-4 -> M-wheel-up
75 M-C-mouse-4 -> M-C-wheel-up, H-S-C-M-s-double-mouse-4 ->
76 H-S-C-M-s-double-wheel-up, ...
78 ** Beefed-up syntax-tables.
79 *** recognize multi-character syntactic entities like `begin' and `end'.
80 *** nested string-delimiters (for Postscript's (foo(bar)baz) strings).
81 *** support for infix operators (with precedence).
82 *** support for the $ (paired delimiter) in parse-partial-sexp.
83 *** support for hook-chars whose effect on the parsing-state is specified
84 by elisp code. Thus a char could both close a string and open a comment
85 at the same time and do it in a context-sensitive way.
86 *** ability to add mode-specific data to the partial-parse-state.
88 ** Add a way to convert a keyboard macro to equivalent Lisp code.
90 ** Have a command suggestion help system that recognizes patterns
91 of commands which could be replaced with a simpler common command.
92 It should not make more than one suggestion per 10 minutes.
94 ** Add a way to define input methods by computing them (when first used)
95 from other input methods. Then redefine C-x 8 to use a
96 user-selected input method, with the default being the union of
97 latin-1-prefix and latin-1-postfix.
99 ** Implement a clean way to use different major modes for
100 different parts of a buffer. This could be useful in editing
101 Bison input files, for instance, or other kinds of text
102 where one language is embedded in another language.
104 ** Give start-process the ability to direct standard-error
105 output to a different filter.
107 ** Make desktop.el save the "frame configuration" of Emacs (in some
110 ** Give desktop.el a feature to switch between different named
113 ** Replace finder.el with something that generates an Info file
114 which gives the same information through a menu structure. [Dave
115 Love started on this.]
117 ** Implement a variant of uncompress.el or jka-compr.el that works with
118 GNU Privacy Guard for encryption. [Code exists but isn't assigned.
119 See the Gnus development sources for assigned code concerning GPG
120 use with mail, which is probably a good start.]
122 ** Save undo information in special temporary files, and reload it
123 when needed for undoing. This could extend undo capacity.
125 ** Change the Windows NT menu code
126 so that it handles the deep_p argument and avoids
127 regenerating the whole menu bar menu tree except
128 when the user tries to use the menubar.
130 This requires the RIT to forward the WM_INITMENU message to
131 the main thread, and not return from that message until the main
132 thread has processed the MENU_BAR_ACTIVATE_EVENT and regenerated
133 the whole menu bar. In the mean time, it should process other messages.
135 ** Get some major packages installed: W3 (development version needs
136 significant work), PSGML. Check the assignments file for other
137 packages which might go in and have been missed.
139 ** Make keymaps a first-class Lisp object (this means a rewrite of
140 keymap.c). What should it do apart from being opaque ?
141 multiple inheritance ? faster where-is ? no more fix_submap_inheritance ?
144 ** Provide real menus on ttys. The MS-DOS implementation can serve as
145 an example how to do part of this.
147 ** Implement popular parts of the rest of the CL functions as compiler
150 ** Make compiler warnings about functions that might be undefined at run time
151 smarter, so that they know which files are required by the file being
152 compiled and don't warn about functions defined in them.
154 ** Highlight rectangles (`mouse-track-rectangle-p' in XEmacs). Already in CUA,
155 but it's a valuable feature worth making more general.
157 ** Support simultaneous tty and X frames.
159 ** Provide MIME support for Rmail using the Gnus MIME library. [Maybe
160 not now feasible, given Gnus maintenance decisions. fx looked at
161 this and can say where some of the problems are.]
163 ** Eliminate the storm of warnings concerning char/unsigned char
164 mismatches that we get with proprietary compilers on various systems.
165 They make it difficult to spot the important warnings.
167 ** Fix anything necessary to use `long long' EMACS_INTs with GCC.
169 ** Split out parts of lisp.h and generate Makefile dependencies
174 ** Allow auto-compression-mode to use zlib calls if zlib is available.
175 [It's required for PNG, so may be linked anyhow.]
177 ** Add a --pristine startup flag which does -q --no-site-file plus
178 ignoring X resources (Doze equivalents?) and most of the
179 environment. What should not be ignored needs consideration.
181 ** Investigate using the language environment (or locale?) to set up
182 more things, such as the default Ispell dictionary, calendar
183 holidays, quoting characters?,...
185 ** Improve the GC (generational, incremental). (We may be able to use
186 the Boehm collector.) [See the Boehm-GC branch in CVS for work on
189 ** Check what hooks would help Emacspeak -- see the defadvising in W3.
191 ** Add horizontal scroll bars.
193 ** Provide an optional feature which computes a scroll bar slider's
194 size and its position from lines instead of characters.
196 ** Make the Custom themes support do useful things.
198 ** Add support for SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) rendering to
201 ** Allow unknown image types to be rendered via an external program
202 converting them to, say, PBM (in the same way as PostScript?).
204 ** Allow displaying an X window from an external program in a buffer,
205 e.g. to render graphics from Java applets. [gerd and/or wmperry
206 thought this was feasible.]
208 ** Allow images (not just text) in the margin to be mouse-sensitive.
209 (Requires recursing through display properties). Provide some way
210 to simulate mouse-clicks on marginal text without a mouse.
212 ** Implement Lisp functions to determine properly whether a character
213 is displayable (particularly needed in XFree 4, sigh). Use it to
214 define useful glyphs that may be displayed as images or unicodes
215 (with ASCIIfied fallback via latin1-disp). Examples include
216 box-drawing graphics in Custom buffers, W3 rules and tables, and
217 tree displays generally, mode-line mail indicator. [See work done
218 already for Emacs 22 and consult fx.]
220 ** Do something to make rms happy with fx's dynamic loading, and use it
221 to implement things like auto-loaded buffer parsers and database
222 access in cases which need more than Lisp.
224 ** Extend ps-print to deal with multiple font sizes, images, and extra
227 ** Provide portable undumping using mmap (per gerd design).
229 ** Use the XIE X extension, if available, for image display.
231 ** Make monochrome images display using the foreground and background
232 colors of the applicable faces.
234 ** Add support for rendering antialiased text, probably using
237 ** Port the conservative stack marking code of Emacs' garbage collector
238 to more systems, so that we can completely get rid of GCPROs.
240 ** Reorder defcustom's in each package so that the more important
241 options come first in the Customize buffers. This could be done by
242 either rearranging the file (since options are shown in the order
243 they appear in the *.el files), or by adding a few :set-after
246 ** Maybe document the features of libraries missing from the manual (or
247 ancillary manuals, including the Lisp manual in some cases).
248 This is not worth doing for all of these packages and we need not
249 aim for completeness, but some may be worth documenting.
251 Here's a list which is probably not complete/correct: align, allout,
252 artist, ansi-color, array, battery, calculator, cdl, cmuscheme,
253 completion, cua, delim-col, dirtrack, double, echistory, elide-head,
254 easymenu, expand, flow-ctrl, format [format-alist],
255 generic/generic-x [various modes], kermit, log-edit, ledit
256 [obsolete?], makesum, midnight [other than in Kill Buffer node],
257 mouse-copy [?], mouse-drag, mouse-sel, net-utils, rcompile,
258 snmp-mode [?], soundex [should be interactive?], strokes [start from
259 the web page], talk, thingatpt [interactive functions?], type-break,
260 vcursor, xscheme, zone-mode [?], mlconvert [?], iso-cvt, iso-swed,
261 swedish, feedmail [?], uce, bruce, gametree, meese, page-ext,
262 refbib, refer, scribe, sgml-mode, spell, texinfo, underline,
263 cmacexp, hideif, mantemp [obsolete?], pcomplete, assoc, xml,
264 cvs-status (should be described in PCL-CVS manual); other progmodes,
265 probably in separate manual.
267 ** Convert the XPM bitmaps to PPM, replace the PBMs with them and scrap
268 the XPMs so that the colour versions work generally. (Requires care
269 with the colour used for the transparent regions.)
271 ** Convenient access to the `values' variable. It would be nice to have an
272 interface that would show you the printed reps of the elements of the
273 list in a menu, let you select one of the values, and put it into some
274 other variable, without changing the value of `values'.
276 ** (Controlled by a flag) make open and close syntax match exactly,
277 i.e. `(' doesn't match `]'.
279 ** Specify parameter ID-FORMAT in all calls to `file-attributes' and
280 `directory-files-and-attributes' where attributes UID or GID are used.
281 Whenever possible, use value 'string.
282 When done, change meaning of default value from 'integer to 'string.
283 If value 'integer is used nowhere, remove the parameter ID-FORMAT from
284 the definition of `file-attributes' and `directory-files-and-attributes'
287 ** Make language-info-alist customizable. Currently a user can customize
288 only the variable `current-language-environment'.
290 ** Improve language environment handling so that Emacs can fit
291 better to a users locale. Currently Emacs uses utf-8 language
292 environment for all utf-8 locales, thus a user in ja_JP.UTF-8 locale
293 are also put in utf-8 lang. env. In such a case, it is
294 better to use Japanese lang. env. but prefer utf-8 coding system.
296 ** Eliminate the current restriction on header printing by ps-print.
297 Currently, a header can contain only single 1-byte charset in
300 ** In ps-print, provide an user friendly interface to specify fonts.
302 ** OpenType font support for various complex scripts (e.g. Devanagari).
303 As X protocal doesn't provide a way to access OpenType Layout Tables
304 in a OpenType font of a server side, we need a way to utilize local
305 fonts (perhaps by directly using the Freetype library or indirectly
308 ** Enhance word boundary detection for such a script that doesn't use
309 space at word boundary (e.g. Thai).
311 ** Implement interface programs with major Japanese conversion server
312 in lib-src so that they can be used from the input method
313 "japanese". Currently, most Japanese users are using external
314 packages (e.g. tamago, anthy) or an input method via XIM.
318 ** Replace Emacs's regex.c with the new DFA-based glibc regex code.
320 ** Replace gmalloc.c with the modified Doug Lea code from the current
321 GNU libc so that the special mmapping of buffers can be removed --
322 that apparently loses under Solaris, at least. [fx has mostly done
325 ** Rewrite make-docfile to be clean and maintainable.
327 ** Add an inferior-comint-minor-mode to capture the common set of operations
328 offered by major modes that offer an associated inferior
329 comint-derived mode. I.e. basically make cmuscheme.el/inf-lisp.el generic.
330 For use by sml-mode, python-mode, tex-mode, scheme-mode, lisp-mode,
331 haskell-mode, tuareg-mode, ...
333 ;;; arch-tag: b0a3e40b-726a-457d-9999-ba848321b036