1 Emacs TODO List -*-outline-*-
3 Copyright (c) 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006
4 Free software Foundation, Inc.
5 See the end of the file for copying permissions.
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. Since Emacs is an FSF-copyrighted package, please be
11 prepared to sign legal papers to transfer the copyright on your work
14 * Small but important fixes needed in existing features:
16 ** mouse-autoselect-window should wait to select the window until
17 the mouse is put to rest or after a delay or both, so that moving over
18 a window doesn't select it.
20 ** In C-x d, the default if you type RET should be the directory name,
21 but if you type M-n you should get the visited file name of the
24 ** describe-face should show an example of text in the face.
26 ** Distribute a bar cursor of width > 1 evenly between the two glyphs
27 on each side of the bar (what to do at the edges?).
29 ** Make vc-checkin avoid reverting the buffer if has not changed after
30 the checkin. Comparing (md5 BUFFER) to (md5 FILE) should be enough.
32 ** buffer-offer-save should be a permanent local.
34 ** revert-buffer should eliminate overlays and the mark.
36 ** erase-buffer should perhaps disregard read-only properties of text.
38 ** Make occur correctly handle matches that span more than one line,
39 as well as overlapping matches.
41 ** Fix the kill/yank treatment of invisible text. At the moment,
42 invisible text is placed in the kill-ring, so that the contents of
43 the ring may not correspond to the text as displayed to the user.
44 It ought to be possible to omit text which is invisible (due to a
45 text-property, overlay, or selective display) from the kill-ring.
47 ** Change the way define-minor-mode handles autoloading.
48 It should not generate :require. Or :require in defcustom
49 should not be recorded in the user's custom-set-variables call.
51 ** The buttons at the top of a custom buffer should not omit
52 variables whose values are currently hidden.
54 ** Clean up the variables in browse-url. Perhaps use a shell command string to
55 specify the browser instead of the mushrooming set of functions.
56 See also ESR's proposal for a BROWSER environment variable
57 <URL:http://www.catb.org/~esr/BROWSER/browse-url.patch>.
59 ** Enhance scroll-bar to handle tall line (similar to line-move).
61 ** Make occur handle multi-line matches cleanly with context.
63 ** In Custom buffers, put the option that turns a mode on or off first,
64 using a heuristic of some kind?
66 ** Define recompute-arg and recompute-arg-if for fix_command to use.
67 See rms message of 11 Dec 05.
69 ** Height returned by frame-parameter ... and height given to
70 make-frame does not mean the same thing. The former includes menu and
71 tool bar lines, the latter don't. frame-parameter should return height
72 without menu and tool bar lines.
74 ** In Emacs Info, examples of using Customize should be clickable
75 and they should create Custom buffers.
77 ** The toolbar should show keyboard equivalents in its tooltips.
79 ** Modify allout.el to use overlays, like outline.el.
81 ** M-! M-n should fetch the buffer-file-name as the default.
83 ** Redesign the load-history data structure so it can cope better
84 with evaluating definitions of the same function from different files,
85 recording which file the latest definition came from.
89 ** Provide user-friendly ways to list all available font families,
90 list fonts, display a font as a sample, etc. [fx is looking at
91 multilingual font selection for the Unicode branch of Emacs.]
93 ** Provide a convenient way to select a color with the mouse.
95 ** Rewrite the face code to be simpler, clearer and faster.
97 ** Program Enriched mode to read and save in RTF. [Is there actually a
98 decent single definition of RTF? Maybe see info at
99 http://latex2rtf.sourceforge.net/.] This task seems to be addressed
100 by http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/emacs-rtf/, which is still in
103 ** Implement something better than the current Refill mode. This
104 probably needs some primitive support.
106 ** Add a command to make a "Local Variables" section in the current buffer
107 and/or add a variable to the list.
109 ** Implement primitive and higher-level functions to allow filling
110 properly with variable-pitch faces.
112 ** Implement a smoother vertical scroll facility, one that allows
113 C-v to scroll through a tall image. The primitive operations
114 posn-at-point and posn-at-x-y should now make it doable in elisp.
116 ** Implement intelligent search/replace, going beyond query-replace
117 (see http://graphics.csail.mit.edu/~rcm/chi04.pdf).
119 ** Implement other text formatting properties.
120 *** Footnotes that can appear either in place or at the end of the page.
121 *** text property that says "don't break line in middle of this".
122 Don't break the line between two characters that have the
123 same value of this property.
124 *** Discretionary hyphens that are not visible when they are at end of line.
126 ** Internationalize Emacs's messages.
128 ** Set up a facility to save backtraces when errors happen during
129 specified filters, specified timers, and specified hooks.
131 ** Install mmc@maruska.dyndns.org's no-flicker change.
133 ** Add a "current vertical pixel level" value that goes with point,
134 so that motion commands can also move through tall images.
135 This value would be to point as window-vscroll is to window-start.
137 ** Address internationalization of symbols names essentially
138 as documentation, e.g. in command names and Custom.
140 ** Make the Lucid menu widget display multilingual text. [This
141 probably needs to be done from actual Emacs buffers, either directly
142 in the menu or by rendering in an unmapped window and copying the
143 pixels. The current code assumes a specific locale; that isn't good
144 enough even if X can render the arbitrary text] [The gtk
145 port now displays multilingual text in menus, but only insofar as
146 Emacs can encode it as utf-8 and gtk can display the result.]
147 Maybe making Lucid menus work like Gtk's (i.e. just force utf-8) is good
148 enough now that Emacs can encode most chars into utf-8.
150 ** Remove the limitation that window and frame widths and heights can
151 be only full columns/lines.
153 * Other features we would like:
155 ** Remove the default toggling behavior of minor modes when called from elisp
156 rather than interactively. This a trivial one-liner in easy-mode.el.
157 ** Create a category of errors called `user-error' for errors which are
158 typically due to pilot errors and should thus be in debug-ignored-errors.
160 ** Give Tar mode all the features of Archive mode.
162 ** Create a category of errors called `process-error'
163 for some or all errors associated with using subprocesses.
165 ** Maybe reinterpret `parse-error' as a category of errors
166 and put some other errors under it.
168 ** A function to tell you the argument pattern of functions.
169 See `function-arity' in http://www.loveshack.ukfsn.org/emacs/fx-misc.el.
171 ** Make byte-compile warn when a doc string is too wide.
173 ** A function to check for customizable options that have been
174 set but not saved, and ask the user whether to save them.
175 This could go in kill-emacs-query-functions, to remind people
176 to save their changes. If the user says yes, show them
177 in a Custom buffer using customize-customized.
179 ** Record the sxhash of the default value for customized variables
180 and notify the user (maybe by adding a menu item or toolbar button,
181 as the detection can occur during autoload time) when the default
182 changes (meaning that new versions of the Lisp source with a changed
183 default value got installed) and offer ediff on the respective
184 customization buffers.
186 ** Emacs Lisp mode could put an overlay on the defun for every
187 function that has advice. The overlay could have `after-text' like
188 " [Function has advice]". It might look like (defun foo [Function
189 has advice] (x y) The overlay could also be a button that you could
190 use to view the advice.
194 This is hard to make work because sftp doesn't print status
197 *** Use MLS for ange-ftp-insert-directory if a list of files is specified.
199 ** Ability to map a key, including all modified-combinations.
200 E.g map mouse-4 to wheel-up as well as M-mouse-4 -> M-wheel-up
201 M-C-mouse-4 -> M-C-wheel-up, H-S-C-M-s-double-mouse-4 ->
202 H-S-C-M-s-double-wheel-up, ...
204 ** Beefed-up syntax-tables.
205 *** recognize multi-character syntactic entities like `begin' and `end'.
206 *** nested string-delimiters (for Postscript's (foo(bar)baz) strings).
207 *** support for infix operators (with precedence).
208 *** support for the $ (paired delimiter) in parse-partial-sexp.
209 *** support for hook-chars whose effect on the parsing-state is specified
210 by elisp code. Thus a char could both close a string and open a comment
211 at the same time and do it in a context-sensitive way.
212 *** ability to add mode-specific data to the partial-parse-state.
214 ** Add a way to convert a keyboard macro to equivalent Lisp code.
216 ** Have a command suggestion help system that recognizes patterns
217 of commands which could be replaced with a simpler common command.
218 It should not make more than one suggestion per 10 minutes.
220 ** Add a way to define input methods by computing them (when first used)
221 from other input methods. Then redefine C-x 8 to use a
222 user-selected input method, with the default being the union of
223 latin-1-prefix and latin-1-postfix.
225 ** Implement a clean way to use different major modes for
226 different parts of a buffer. This could be useful in editing
227 Bison input files, for instance, or other kinds of text
228 where one language is embedded in another language. See
229 http://www.loveshack.ukfsn.org/emacs/multi-mode.el and also
230 mmm-mode, as reference for approaches took by others.
232 ** Arrange a way for an input method to return the first character
233 immediately, then replace it later. So that C-s a with
234 input method latin-1-postfix would immediately search for an a.
236 ** Give start-process the ability to direct standard-error
237 output to a different filter.
239 ** Make desktop.el save the "frame configuration" of Emacs (in some
242 ** Give desktop.el a feature to switch between different named
245 ** Replace finder.el with something that generates an Info file
246 which gives the same information through a menu structure. [Dave
247 Love started on this.]
249 ** Add a cpio mode, more or less like tar mode.
251 ** Implement a variant of uncompress.el or jka-compr.el that works with
252 GNU Privacy Guard for encryption. [Code exists but isn't assigned.
253 See the Gnus development sources for assigned code concerning GPG
254 use with mail, which is probably a good start.] See also
255 http://www.loveshack.ukfsn.org/emacs/auto-crypt.tgz.
257 ** Save undo information in special temporary files, and reload it
258 when needed for undoing. This could extend undo capacity.
260 ** Change the Windows NT menu code
261 so that it handles the deep_p argument and avoids
262 regenerating the whole menu bar menu tree except
263 when the user tries to use the menubar.
265 This requires the RIT to forward the WM_INITMENU message to
266 the main thread, and not return from that message until the main
267 thread has processed the MENU_BAR_ACTIVATE_EVENT and regenerated
268 the whole menu bar. In the mean time, it should process other messages.
270 ** Get some major packages installed: W3 (development version needs
271 significant work), PSGML. Check the assignments file for other
272 packages which might go in and have been missed.
274 ** Make keymaps a first-class Lisp object (this means a rewrite of
275 keymap.c). What should it do apart from being opaque ?
276 multiple inheritance ? faster where-is ? no more fix_submap_inheritance ?
279 ** Provide real menus on ttys. The MS-DOS implementation can serve as
280 an example how to do part of this.
282 ** Implement popular parts of the rest of the CL functions as compiler
285 ** Make compiler warnings about functions that might be undefined at run time
286 smarter, so that they know which files are required by the file being
287 compiled and don't warn about functions defined in them.
289 ** Highlight rectangles (`mouse-track-rectangle-p' in XEmacs). Already in CUA,
290 but it's a valuable feature worth making more general.
292 ** Support simultaneous tty and X frames. [See the multi-tty branch of Emacs
293 at http://lorentey.hu/project/emacs.]
295 ** Provide MIME support for Rmail using the Gnus MIME library. [Maybe
296 not now feasible, given Gnus maintenance decisions. fx looked at
297 this and can say where some of the problems are.]
299 ** Eliminate the storm of warnings concerning char/unsigned char
300 mismatches that we get with GCC 4.x and proprietary compilers on
301 various systems. They make it difficult to spot the important
304 ** Fix anything necessary to use `long long' EMACS_INTs with GCC.
306 ** Split out parts of lisp.h and generate Makefile dependencies
311 ** Allow auto-compression-mode to use zlib calls if zlib is available.
312 [It's required for PNG, so may be linked anyhow.]
314 ** Add a --pristine startup flag which does -q --no-site-file plus
315 ignoring X resources (Doze equivalents?) and most of the
316 environment. What should not be ignored needs consideration.
318 ** Improve the GC (generational, incremental). (We may be able to use
319 the Boehm collector.) [See the Boehm-GC branch in CVS for work on
322 ** Check what hooks would help Emacspeak -- see the defadvising in W3.
324 ** Add definitions for symbol properties, for documentation purposes.
326 ** Add horizontal scroll bars.
328 ** Provide an optional feature which computes a scroll bar slider's
329 size and its position from lines instead of characters.
331 ** Add support for SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) rendering to
334 ** Allow unknown image types to be rendered via an external program
335 converting them to, say, PBM (in the same way as PostScript?).
337 ** Allow displaying an X window from an external program in a buffer,
338 e.g. to render graphics from Java applets. [gerd and/or wmperry
339 thought this was feasible.]
341 ** Allow images (not just text) in the margin to be mouse-sensitive.
342 (Requires recursing through display properties). Provide some way
343 to simulate mouse-clicks on marginal text without a mouse.
345 ** Implement Lisp functions to determine properly whether a character
346 is displayable (particularly needed in XFree 4, sigh). Use it to
347 define useful glyphs that may be displayed as images or unicodes
348 (with ASCIIfied fallback via latin1-disp). Examples include
349 box-drawing graphics in Custom buffers, W3 rules and tables, and
350 tree displays generally, mode-line mail indicator. [See work done
351 already for Emacs 22 and consult fx.]
353 ** Do something to make rms happy with fx's dynamic loading, and use it
354 to implement things like auto-loaded buffer parsers and database
355 access in cases which need more than Lisp.
357 ** Extend ps-print to deal with multiple font sizes, images, and extra
360 ** Provide portable undumping using mmap (per gerd design).
362 ** Make byte-compile avoid binding an expanded defsubst's args
363 when the body only calls primitives.
365 ** Use the XIE X extension, if available, for image display.
367 ** Make monochrome images display using the foreground and background
368 colors of the applicable faces.
372 ** Make `format-time-string' preserve text properties like `format'.
374 ** Optionally make the cursor a little thinner at the end of a line
375 or the end of the buffer.
377 ** Add support for rendering antialiased text, probably using
380 ** Port the conservative stack marking code of Emacs' garbage collector
381 to more systems, so that we can completely get rid of GCPROs. Note
382 that Boehm garbage collector provides this.
384 ** Reorder defcustom's in each package so that the more important
385 options come first in the Customize buffers. This could be done by
386 either rearranging the file (since options are shown in the order
387 they appear in the *.el files), or by adding a few :set-after
390 ** Maybe document the features of libraries missing from the manual (or
391 ancillary manuals, including the Lisp manual in some cases).
392 This is not worth doing for all of these packages and we need not
393 aim for completeness, but some may be worth documenting.
395 Here's a list which is probably not complete/correct: align, allout,
396 artist, ansi-color, array, battery, calculator, cdl, cmuscheme,
397 completion, cua, delim-col, dirtrack, double, echistory, elide-head,
398 easymenu, expand, flow-ctrl, format [format-alist],
399 generic/generic-x [various modes], kermit, log-edit, ledit
400 [obsolete?], makesum, midnight [other than in Kill Buffer node],
401 mouse-copy [?], mouse-drag, mouse-sel, net-utils, rcompile,
402 snmp-mode [?], soundex [should be interactive?], strokes [start from
403 the web page], talk, thingatpt [interactive functions?], type-break,
404 vcursor, xscheme, zone-mode [?], mlconvert [?], iso-cvt, iso-swed,
405 swedish, feedmail [?], uce, bruce, gametree, meese, page-ext,
406 refbib, refer, scribe, sgml-mode, spell, texinfo, underline,
407 cmacexp, hideif, mantemp [obsolete?], pcomplete, assoc, xml,
408 cvs-status (should be described in PCL-CVS manual); other progmodes,
409 probably in separate manual.
411 ** Convert the XPM bitmaps to PPM, replace the PBMs with them and scrap
412 the XPMs so that the colour versions work generally. (Requires care
413 with the colour used for the transparent regions.)
415 ** Convenient access to the `values' variable. It would be nice to have an
416 interface that would show you the printed reps of the elements of the
417 list in a menu, let you select one of the values, and put it into some
418 other variable, without changing the value of `values'.
420 ** (Controlled by a flag) make open and close syntax match exactly,
421 i.e. `(' doesn't match `]'.
423 ** Specify parameter ID-FORMAT in all calls to `file-attributes' and
424 `directory-files-and-attributes' where attributes UID or GID are used.
425 Whenever possible, use value 'string.
426 When done, change meaning of default value from 'integer to 'string.
427 If value 'integer is used nowhere, remove the parameter ID-FORMAT from
428 the definition of `file-attributes' and `directory-files-and-attributes'
431 ** Make language-info-alist customizable. Currently a user can customize
432 only the variable `current-language-environment'.
434 ** Improve language environment handling so that Emacs can fit
435 better to a users locale. Currently Emacs uses utf-8 language
436 environment for all utf-8 locales, thus a user in ja_JP.UTF-8 locale
437 are also put in utf-8 lang. env. In such a case, it is
438 better to use Japanese lang. env. but prefer utf-8 coding system.
440 ** Enhance locale handling: handle language, territory and charset
441 orthogonally and de-emphasize language environments. Use the locale
442 to set up more things, such as fontsets, the default Ispell
443 dictionary, diary format, calendar holidays and display, quoting
444 characters and phrase boundaries, sentence endings, collation for
445 sorting (at least for unicodes), HTTP Accept-language, patterns for
446 directory listings and compilation messages, yes-or-no replies,
447 common menu items when the toolkit supports it ... `locale-info'
448 needs extending for LC_COLLATE &c. [fx started on this.]
450 ** Eliminate the current restriction on header printing by ps-print.
451 Currently, a header can contain only single 1-byte charset in
454 ** In ps-print, provide an user friendly interface to specify fonts.
456 ** OpenType font support for various complex scripts (e.g. Devanagari).
457 As X protocal doesn't provide a way to access OpenType Layout Tables
458 in a OpenType font of a server side, we need a way to utilize local
459 fonts (perhaps by directly using the Freetype library or indirectly
462 ** Enhance word boundary detection for such a script that doesn't use
463 space at word boundary (e.g. Thai).
465 ** Implement interface programs with major Japanese conversion server
466 in lib-src so that they can be used from the input method
467 "japanese". Currently, most Japanese users are using external
468 packages (e.g. tamago, anthy) or an input method via XIM.
470 ** Let LEIM handle the Mode_switch key like XIM does (i.e. a toggle like C-\
471 but which can also be used as a modifier).
473 ** Provide the toolbar on ttys. This could map a bit like tmm-menubar
474 for the menubar and buttons could look a bit like those used by customize.
476 ** Improve Help buffers: Change the face of previously visited links (like
477 Info, but also with regard to namespace), add a forward button to make the
478 Help buffer more browser like and gives the value of lisp expressions
479 e.g auto-mode-alist, the right face. [nickrob@snap.net.nz has a patch
480 for this for inclusion after 22.1].
482 ** Possibly make `list-holidays' eval items in the calendar-holidays variable.
484 <http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2006-02/msg01034.html>.
485 [rgm@gnu.org will look at this after 22.1]
489 ** Replace gmalloc.c with the modified Doug Lea code from the current
490 GNU libc so that the special mmapping of buffers can be removed --
491 that apparently loses under Solaris, at least. [fx has mostly done
494 ** Rewrite make-docfile to be clean and maintainable.
496 ** Add an inferior-comint-minor-mode to capture the common set of operations
497 offered by major modes that offer an associated inferior
498 comint-derived mode. I.e. basically make cmuscheme.el/inf-lisp.el generic.
499 For use by sml-mode, python-mode, tex-mode, scheme-mode, lisp-mode,
500 haskell-mode, tuareg-mode, ...
502 ** Make SYNC_INPUT the default.
503 All loops using immediate_quit need to be checked to ensure that
504 C-g can interrupt them, in case of an infinite loop. Once we
505 switch to using SYNC_INPUT, we can remove the BLOCK_INPUTs in the
506 allocation functions (allocate_string etc.) without worrying about
509 ** Add "link" button class
510 Add a standard button-class named "link", and make all other link-like
511 button classes inherit from it. Set the default face of the "link" button
512 class to the standard "link" face.
516 ** a two-char comment-starter whose two chars are symbol constituents will
517 not be noticed if it appears within a word.
519 ** Fix unexelf.c to handle the .data.rel and .data.rel.local
520 sections made by GCC 3.4 on IRIX.
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531 The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be
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534 ;;; arch-tag: b0a3e40b-726a-457d-9999-ba848321b036