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1 Emacs TODO List -*-outline-*-
2
3 Copyright (C) 2001-2011 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. Since Emacs is an FSF-copyrighted package, please be
11 prepared to sign legal papers to transfer the copyright on your work
12 to the FSF.
13
14 * Tentative plan for Emacs-24
15
16 ** Bidi
17 ** lexbind: I haven't checked the status of the code recently, so
18 I don't know how realistic it is to include it. But it's been around
19 for a long time, and I trust Miles, so I have hope.
20 ** concurrency: including it as an "experimental" compile-time option
21 sounds good. Of course there might still be big questions around
22 "which form of concurrency" we'll want.
23 ** Overhaul of customize: sounds wonderful.
24 ** some kind of color-theme: agreed.
25 ** better support for dynamic embedded graphics: I like this idea (my
26 mpc.el code could use it for the volume widget), tho I wonder if the
27 resulting efficiency will be sufficient.
28 ** Spread Semantic.
29 ** Improve the "code snippets" support: consolidate skeleton.el, tempo.el,
30 and expand.el (any other?) and then advertise/use/improve it.
31 ** Improve VC: yes, there's a lot of work to be done there :-(
32 And most of it could/should make it into Emacs-23.3.
33 ** package manager.
34
35 ** Random things that cross my mind right now that I'd like to see (some of
36 them from my local hacks), but it's not obvious at all whether they'll
37 make it.
38 *** multiple inheritance for keymaps (to get rid of the
39 fix_submap_inheritance hack and to more cleanly express the
40 relationship between minibuffer-local-*-map): I've had this locally
41 for a long time, but the details of the semantics is somewhat ... delicate.
42 *** prog-mode could/should provide a better fill-paragraph default
43 that uses syntax-tables to recognize string/comment boundaries.
44 *** provide more completion-at-point-functions. Make existing
45 in-buffer completion use completion-at-point.
46 *** "functional" function-key-map that would make it easy to add (and
47 remove) mappings like "FOO-mouse-4 -> FOO-scroll-down",
48 "FOO-tab -> ?\FOO-\t", "uppercase -> lowercase", "[fringe KEY...] ->
49 [KEY]", "H-FOO -> M-FOO", "C-x C-y FOO -> H-FOO", ...
50
51
52 * Simple tasks. These don't require much Emacs knowledge, they are
53 suitable for anyone from beginners to experts.
54
55 ** Convert modes that use view-mode to be derived from special-mode instead.
56
57 ** Major modes should have a menu entry. Examples of modes that do
58 not have one at the moment and probably should: text-mode, inferior-lisp-mode.
59
60 ** Check if all items on the mode-line have a suitable tooltip for all modes.
61
62 ** edebug and debugger-mode should have a toolbar.
63 It can use the same icons as gud.
64
65 ** Check what minor modes don't use define-minor-mode and convert them
66 to use it.
67
68 ** Convert all defvars with leading `*' in the doc-strings into defcustoms
69 of appropriate :type and :group.
70
71 ** Remove any leading `*'s from defcustom doc-strings.
72
73 ** Remove unnecessary autoload cookies from defcustoms.
74 This needs a bit of care, since often people have become used to
75 expecting such variables to always be defined, eg when they modify
76 things in their .emacs.
77
78 ** See if other files can use generated-autoload-file (see eg ps-print).
79
80 * Small but important fixes needed in existing features:
81
82 ** Flymake's customization mechanism needs to be both simpler (fewer
83 levels of indirection) and better documented, so it is easier to
84 understand. I find it quite hard to figure out what compilation
85 command it will use.
86
87 I suggest totally rewriting that part of Flymake, using the simplest
88 mechanism that sufficies for the specific needs. That will be easy
89 for users to customize.
90
91 ** Compute the list of active keymaps *after* reading the first event.
92
93 ** Distribute a bar cursor of width > 1 evenly between the two glyphs
94 on each side of the bar (what to do at the edges?).
95
96 ** buffer-offer-save should be a permanent local.
97
98 ** revert-buffer should eliminate overlays and the mark.
99 For related problems consult the thread starting with
100 http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2005-11/msg01346.html
101
102 ** erase-buffer should perhaps disregard read-only properties of text.
103
104 ** Fix the kill/yank treatment of invisible text. At the moment,
105 invisible text is placed in the kill-ring, so that the contents of
106 the ring may not correspond to the text as displayed to the user.
107 It ought to be possible to omit text which is invisible (due to a
108 text-property, overlay, or selective display) from the kill-ring.
109
110 ** Change the way define-minor-mode handles autoloading.
111 It should not generate :require. Or :require in defcustom
112 should not be recorded in the user's custom-set-variables call.
113
114 ** Feature to change cursor shape when Emacs is idle (for more than
115 a specified time).
116
117 ** The buttons at the top of a custom buffer should not omit
118 variables whose values are currently hidden.
119
120 ** Clean up the variables in browse-url. Perhaps use a shell command string to
121 specify the browser instead of the mushrooming set of functions.
122 See also ESR's proposal for a BROWSER environment variable
123 <URL:http://www.catb.org/~esr/BROWSER/browse-url.patch>.
124
125 ** Enhance scroll-bar to handle tall line (similar to line-move).
126
127 ** In Custom buffers, put the option that turns a mode on or off first,
128 using a heuristic of some kind?
129
130 ** Define recompute-arg and recompute-arg-if for fix_command to use.
131 See rms message of 11 Dec 05.
132
133 ** Height returned by frame-parameter ... and height given to
134 make-frame does not mean the same thing. The former includes menu and
135 tool bar lines, the latter don't. frame-parameter should return height
136 without menu and tool bar lines.
137
138 ** In Emacs Info, examples of using Customize should be clickable
139 and they should create Custom buffers.
140
141 ** The toolbar should show keyboard equivalents in its tooltips.
142
143 ** Add function to redraw the tool bar.
144
145 ** Redesign the load-history data structure so it can cope better
146 with evaluating definitions of the same function from different files,
147 recording which file the latest definition came from.
148
149 ** make back_comment use syntax-ppss or equivalent.
150
151 ** Consider improving src/sysdep.c's search for a fqdn.
152 http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2007-04/msg00782.html
153
154 ** Find a proper fix for rcirc multiline nick adding.
155 http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2007-04/msg00684.html
156
157 ** Implement `network-interface-list' and `network-interface-info'
158 on MS-Windows. Hint: the information is present in the Registry,
159 under the keys
160 HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip\Linkage\
161 and
162 HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\<device>\
163 where <device> is the network device found under the first key.
164
165 ** Check for any included packages that define obsolete bug-reporting commands.
166 Change them to use report-emacs-bug.
167
168 ** Allow fringe indicators to display a tooltip (provide a help-echo property?)
169
170 ** Add a defcustom that supplies a function to name numeric backup files,
171 like make-backup-file-name-function for non-numeric backup files.
172
173 ** `dired-mode' should specify the semantics of `buffer-modified-p' for
174 dired buffers and DTRT WRT `auto-revert-mode'.
175
176 ** Check uses of prin1 for error-handling.
177 http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2008-08/msg00456.html
178
179 * Important features:
180 ** Extended text-properties (to make overlays "obsolete")
181 *** Several text-property planes
182 This would get us rid of font-lock-face property (and I'd be happy to
183 get rid of char-property-alias-alist as well) since font-lock would
184 simply use the `face' property in the `font-lock' plane.
185 Each property would come with an Elisp merge-function. The merge
186 would be performed in add-text-properties.
187 *** zero-width text-properties.
188 ** Having tabs above a window to switch buffers in it.
189
190 ** "Perspectives" are named persistent window configurations. We have
191 had the window configuration mechanism in GNU Emacs since the
192 beginning but we have never developed a good user interface to take
193 advantage of them. Eclipse's user interface seems to be good.
194
195 Perspectives work well even if you do the equivalent of C-x 4 C-f
196 because of the distinction between view windows vs file windows. In
197 Emacs this is more or less the "dedicated window" feature, but we have
198 never really made it work for this.
199
200 Perspectives also need to interact with the tabs.
201
202 ** Imenu could be extended into a file-structure browsing mechanism
203 using code like that of customize-groups.
204
205 ** Display something in the margin on lines that have compilation errors.
206
207 ** Compilation error navigation bar, parallel to the scroll bar,
208 indicating where in the buffer there are compilation errors.
209 Perhaps we could arrange to display these error indications on top
210 of the scroll bar itself. That depends on to what extent toolkit
211 scroll bars are extensible.
212
213 ** Provide user-friendly ways to list all available font families,
214 list fonts, display a font as a sample, etc. [fx is looking at
215 multilingual font selection for the Unicode branch of Emacs.]
216
217 ** Provide a convenient way to select a color with the mouse.
218
219 ** Rewrite the face code to be simpler, clearer and faster.
220
221 ** Program Enriched mode to read and save in RTF. [Is there actually a
222 decent single definition of RTF? Maybe see info at
223 http://latex2rtf.sourceforge.net/.] This task seems to be addressed
224 by http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/emacs-rtf/, which is still in
225 very early stages.
226
227 ** Implement primitive and higher-level functions to allow filling
228 properly with variable-pitch faces.
229
230 ** Implement a smoother vertical scroll facility, one that allows
231 C-v to scroll through a tall image. The primitive operations
232 posn-at-point and posn-at-x-y should now make it doable in elisp.
233
234 ** Implement intelligent search/replace, going beyond query-replace
235 (see http://groups.csail.mit.edu/uid/projects/clustering/chi04.pdf).
236
237 ** Implement other text formatting properties.
238 *** Footnotes that can appear either in place or at the end of the page.
239 *** text property that says "don't break line in middle of this".
240 Don't break the line between two characters that have the
241 same value of this property.
242 *** Discretionary hyphens that are not visible when they are at end of line.
243
244 ** Internationalize Emacs's messages.
245
246 ** Set up a facility to save backtraces when errors happen during
247 specified filters, specified timers, and specified hooks.
248
249 ** Install mmc@maruska.dyndns.org's no-flicker change.
250
251 ** Add a "current vertical pixel level" value that goes with point,
252 so that motion commands can also move through tall images.
253 This value would be to point as window-vscroll is to window-start.
254
255 ** Address internationalization of symbols names essentially
256 as documentation, e.g. in command names and Custom.
257
258 ** Make the Lucid menu widget display multilingual text. [This
259 probably needs to be done from actual Emacs buffers, either directly
260 in the menu or by rendering in an unmapped window and copying the
261 pixels. The current code assumes a specific locale; that isn't good
262 enough even if X can render the arbitrary text] [The gtk
263 port now displays multilingual text in menus, but only insofar as
264 Emacs can encode it as utf-8 and gtk can display the result.]
265 Maybe making Lucid menus work like Gtk's (i.e. just force utf-8) is good
266 enough now that Emacs can encode most chars into utf-8.
267
268 ** Remove the limitation that window and frame widths and heights can
269 be only full columns/lines.
270
271 * Other features we would like:
272
273 ** Make longlines-mode wrap lines based on screen position instead
274 of character position, so that variable-width fonts can be handled
275 properly.
276
277 ** Allow frames(terminals) created by emacsclient to inherit their environment
278 from the emacsclient process.
279 ** Remove the default toggling behavior of minor modes when called from elisp
280 rather than interactively. This a trivial one-liner in easy-mode.el.
281
282 ** Create a category of errors called `user-error' for errors which are
283 typically due to pilot errors and should thus be in debug-ignored-errors.
284
285 ** Give Tar mode all the features of Archive mode.
286
287 ** Create a category of errors called `process-error'
288 for some or all errors associated with using subprocesses.
289
290 ** Maybe reinterpret `parse-error' as a category of errors
291 and put some other errors under it.
292
293 ** A function to tell you the argument pattern of functions.
294 See `function-arity' in http://www.loveshack.ukfsn.org/emacs/fx-misc.el.
295
296 ** Make byte-compile warn when a doc string is too wide.
297
298 ** Make byte-optimization warnings issue accurate line numbers.
299
300 ** A function to check for customizable options that have been
301 set but not saved, and ask the user whether to save them.
302 This could go in kill-emacs-query-functions, to remind people
303 to save their changes. If the user says yes, show them
304 in a Custom buffer using customize-customized.
305
306 ** Record the sxhash of the default value for customized variables
307 and notify the user (maybe by adding a menu item or toolbar button,
308 as the detection can occur during autoload time) when the default
309 changes (meaning that new versions of the Lisp source with a changed
310 default value got installed) and offer ediff on the respective
311 customization buffers.
312
313 ** Emacs Lisp mode could put an overlay on the defun for every
314 function that has advice. The overlay could have `after-text' like
315 " [Function has advice]". It might look like (defun foo [Function
316 has advice] (x y) The overlay could also be a button that you could
317 use to view the advice.
318
319 ** Add a function to get the insertion-type of the markers in an overlay.
320
321 ** ange-ftp
322 *** understand sftp
323 This is hard to make work because sftp doesn't print status messages.
324
325 *** Use MLS for ange-ftp-insert-directory if a list of files is specified.
326
327 ** Ability to map a key, including all modified-combinations.
328 E.g map mouse-4 to wheel-up as well as M-mouse-4 -> M-wheel-up
329 M-C-mouse-4 -> M-C-wheel-up, H-S-C-M-s-double-mouse-4 ->
330 H-S-C-M-s-double-wheel-up, ...
331
332 ** Beefed-up syntax-tables.
333 *** recognize multi-character syntactic entities like `begin' and `end'.
334 *** nested string-delimiters (for Postscript's (foo(bar)baz) strings).
335 *** support for infix operators (with precedence).
336 *** support for the $ (paired delimiter) in parse-partial-sexp.
337 *** support for hook-chars whose effect on the parsing-state is specified
338 by elisp code. Thus a char could both close a string and open a comment
339 at the same time and do it in a context-sensitive way.
340 *** ability to add mode-specific data to the partial-parse-state.
341
342 ** Add a way to convert a keyboard macro to equivalent Lisp code.
343
344 ** Have a command suggestion help system that recognizes patterns
345 of commands which could be replaced with a simpler common command.
346 It should not make more than one suggestion per 10 minutes.
347
348 ** Add a way to define input methods by computing them (when first used)
349 from other input methods. Then redefine C-x 8 to use a
350 user-selected input method, with the default being the union of
351 latin-1-prefix and latin-1-postfix.
352
353 ** Switch the Windows port to using Unicode keyboard input (maybe).
354 Based on http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms633586.aspx,
355 this boils down to (1) calling RegisterClassW function to register
356 Emacs windows, and (2) modifying ALL system messages to use Unicode.
357 In particular, WM_CHAR messages, which result from keyboard input,
358 will then come in encoded in UTF-16.
359
360 One advantage of switching to Unicode is to toss encoded-kbd usage,
361 which will solve the problem with binding non-ASCII keys with modifiers.
362
363 Problem: using this on Windows 9x/ME requires installing the
364 Microsoft Layer for Unicode (MSLU), which might not implement all
365 the required functionality that is available built-in on Windows XP
366 and later. We should not make this change if it would pressure
367 users of unauthorized copies of older versions of Windows to
368 downgrade to versions that require activation.
369
370 ** Implement a clean way to use different major modes for
371 different parts of a buffer. This could be useful in editing
372 Bison input files, for instance, or other kinds of text
373 where one language is embedded in another language. See
374 http://www.loveshack.ukfsn.org/emacs/multi-mode.el and also
375 mmm-mode, as reference for approaches taken by others.
376
377 ** Arrange a way for an input method to return the first character
378 immediately, then replace it later. So that C-s a with
379 input method latin-1-postfix would immediately search for an a.
380
381 ** Give start-process the ability to direct standard-error
382 output to a different filter.
383
384 ** Make desktop.el save the "frame configuration" of Emacs (in some
385 useful sense).
386
387 ** Give desktop.el a feature to switch between different named desktops.
388
389 ** Add a cpio mode, more or less like tar mode.
390
391 ** Save undo information in special temporary files, and reload it
392 when needed for undoing. This could extend undo capacity.
393
394 ** Change the Windows NT menu code
395 so that it handles the deep_p argument and avoids
396 regenerating the whole menu bar menu tree except
397 when the user tries to use the menubar.
398
399 This requires the RIT to forward the WM_INITMENU message to
400 the main thread, and not return from that message until the main
401 thread has processed the MENU_BAR_ACTIVATE_EVENT and regenerated
402 the whole menu bar. In the mean time, it should process other messages.
403
404 ** Get some major packages installed: W3 (development version needs
405 significant work), PSGML, _possibly_ ECB.
406 http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2007-05/msg01493.html
407 Check the assignments file for other packages which might go in and
408 have been missed.
409
410 ** Possibly install python-mode in place of python.el, or combine the two.
411 Someone needs to do the work of figuring out who all the non-trivial
412 python-mode.el contributors are and getting assignments.
413 http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2008-02/msg02156.html
414 http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2008-02/msg02201.html
415 http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2008-02/msg02489.html
416 http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2008-02/msg02234.html
417
418 ** Make keymaps a first-class Lisp object (this means a rewrite of
419 keymap.c). What should it do apart from being opaque ?
420 multiple inheritance ? faster where-is ? no more fix_submap_inheritance ?
421 what else ?
422
423 ** Provide real menus on ttys. The MS-DOS implementation can serve as
424 an example how to do part of this; see the XMenu* functions on msdos.c.
425
426 ** Implement popular parts of the rest of the CL functions as compiler
427 macros in cl-macs.
428
429 ** Make compiler warnings about functions that might be undefined at run time
430 smarter, so that they know which files are required by the file being
431 compiled and don't warn about functions defined in them.
432
433 ** Highlight rectangles (`mouse-track-rectangle-p' in XEmacs). Already in CUA,
434 but it's a valuable feature worth making more general.
435
436 ** Provide MIME support for Rmail using the Gnus MIME library. [Maybe
437 not now feasible, given Gnus maintenance decisions. fx looked at
438 this and can say where some of the problems are.]
439
440 ** Eliminate the storm of warnings concerning char/unsigned char
441 mismatches that we get with GCC 4.x and proprietary compilers on
442 various systems. They make it difficult to spot the important warnings.
443
444 ** Fix anything necessary to use `long long' EMACS_INTs with GCC.
445
446 ** Split out parts of lisp.h [and generate Makefile dependencies automatically.]
447 [the last bit is done, see DEPFLAGS etc in src/Makefile.in ]
448
449 ** Update the FAQ.
450
451 ** Allow auto-compression-mode to use zlib calls if zlib is available.
452 [It's required for PNG, so may be linked anyhow.]
453
454 ** Add a --pristine startup flag which does -q --no-site-file plus
455 ignoring X resources (Doze equivalents?) and most of the
456 environment. What should not be ignored needs consideration.
457 [Do the existing -Q and -D cover this, or is more needed?]
458
459 ** Improve the GC (generational, incremental). (We may be able to use
460 the Boehm collector.) [See the Boehm-GC branch in CVS for work on this.]
461
462 ** Check what hooks would help Emacspeak -- see the defadvising in W3.
463
464 ** Add definitions for symbol properties, for documentation purposes.
465
466 ** Add horizontal scroll bars.
467
468 ** Provide an optional feature which computes a scroll bar slider's
469 size and its position from lines instead of characters.
470
471 ** Allow unknown image types to be rendered via an external program
472 converting them to, say, PBM (in the same way as PostScript?). [does
473 doc-view.el do this, or could it be extended to do this?]
474
475 ** Allow displaying an X window from an external program in a buffer,
476 e.g. to render graphics from Java applets. [gerd and/or wmperry
477 thought this was feasible.]
478
479 ** Allow images (not just text) in the margin to be mouse-sensitive.
480 (Requires recursing through display properties). Provide some way
481 to simulate mouse-clicks on marginal text without a mouse.
482
483 ** Implement Lisp functions to determine properly whether a character
484 is displayable (particularly needed in XFree 4, sigh). Use it to
485 define useful glyphs that may be displayed as images or unicodes
486 (with ASCIIfied fallback via latin1-disp). Examples include
487 box-drawing graphics in Custom buffers, W3 rules and tables, and
488 tree displays generally, mode-line mail indicator. [See work done
489 already for Emacs 23 and consult fx.]
490
491 ** Do something to make rms happy with fx's dynamic loading, and use it
492 to implement things like auto-loaded buffer parsers and database
493 access in cases which need more than Lisp.
494
495 ** Extend ps-print to deal with multiple font sizes, images, and extra
496 encodings.
497
498 ** Provide portable undumping using mmap (per gerd design).
499
500 ** Make byte-compile avoid binding an expanded defsubst's args
501 when the body only calls primitives.
502
503 ** Use the XIE X extension, if available, for image display.
504
505 ** Make monochrome images display using the foreground and background
506 colors of the applicable faces.
507
508 ** Make `format-time-string' preserve text properties like `format'.
509
510 ** Optionally make the cursor a little thinner at the end of a line
511 or the end of the buffer.
512
513 ** Port the conservative stack marking code of Emacs' garbage collector
514 to more systems, so that we can completely get rid of GCPROs. Note
515 that Boehm garbage collector provides this.
516
517 ** Reorder defcustom's in each package so that the more important
518 options come first in the Customize buffers. This could be done by
519 either rearranging the file (since options are shown in the order
520 they appear in the *.el files), or by adding a few :set-after attributes.
521
522 ** Maybe document the features of libraries missing from the manual (or
523 ancillary manuals, including the Lisp manual in some cases).
524 This is not worth doing for all of these packages and we need not
525 aim for completeness, but some may be worth documenting.
526
527 Here's a list which is probably not complete/correct: align, allout,
528 artist, ansi-color, array, battery, calculator, cdl, cmuscheme,
529 completion, cua, delim-col, dirtrack, double, echistory, elide-head,
530 easymenu, expand, flow-ctrl, format [format-alist],
531 generic/generic-x [various modes], kermit, log-edit, ledit
532 [obsolete?], makesum, midnight [other than in Kill Buffer node],
533 mouse-copy [?], mouse-drag, mouse-sel, net-utils, rcompile,
534 snmp-mode [?], soundex [should be interactive?], strokes [start from
535 the web page], talk, thingatpt [interactive functions?], type-break,
536 vcursor, xscheme, zone-mode [?], mlconvert [?], iso-cvt, iso-swed,
537 swedish, feedmail [?], uce, bruce, gametree, meese, page-ext,
538 refbib, refer, scribe, sgml-mode, spell, texinfo, underline,
539 cmacexp, hideif, mantemp [obsolete?], pcomplete, assoc, xml,
540 cvs-status (should be described in PCL-CVS manual); other progmodes,
541 probably in separate manual.
542
543 ** Convert the XPM bitmaps to PPM, replace the PBMs with them and scrap
544 the XPMs so that the color versions work generally. (Requires care
545 with the color used for the transparent regions.)
546
547 ** Convenient access to the `values' variable. It would be nice to have an
548 interface that would show you the printed reps of the elements of the
549 list in a menu, let you select one of the values, and put it into some
550 other variable, without changing the value of `values'.
551
552 ** (Controlled by a flag) make open and close syntax match exactly,
553 i.e. `(' doesn't match `]'.
554
555 ** Specify parameter ID-FORMAT in all calls to `file-attributes' and
556 `directory-files-and-attributes' where attributes UID or GID are used.
557 Whenever possible, use value 'string.
558 When done, change meaning of default value from 'integer to 'string.
559 If value 'integer is used nowhere, remove the parameter ID-FORMAT from
560 the definition of `file-attributes' and `directory-files-and-attributes'
561 and from the calls.
562
563 ** Make language-info-alist customizable. Currently a user can customize
564 only the variable `current-language-environment'.
565
566 ** Improve language environment handling so that Emacs can fit
567 better to a users locale. Currently Emacs uses utf-8 language
568 environment for all utf-8 locales, thus a user in ja_JP.UTF-8 locale
569 are also put in utf-8 lang. env. In such a case, it is
570 better to use Japanese lang. env. but prefer utf-8 coding system.
571
572 ** Enhance locale handling: handle language, territory and charset
573 orthogonally and de-emphasize language environments. Use the locale
574 to set up more things, such as fontsets, the default Ispell
575 dictionary, diary format, calendar holidays and display, quoting
576 characters and phrase boundaries, sentence endings, collation for
577 sorting (at least for unicodes), HTTP Accept-language, patterns for
578 directory listings and compilation messages, yes-or-no replies,
579 common menu items when the toolkit supports it ... `locale-info'
580 needs extending for LC_COLLATE &c. [fx started on this.]
581
582 ** Eliminate the current restriction on header printing by ps-print.
583 Currently, a header can contain only single 1-byte charset in
584 addition to ASCII.
585
586 ** In ps-print, provide an user friendly interface to specify fonts.
587
588 ** Enhance word boundary detection for such a script that doesn't use
589 space at word boundary (e.g. Thai).
590
591 ** Implement interface programs with major Japanese conversion server
592 in lib-src so that they can be used from the input method
593 "japanese". Currently, most Japanese users are using external
594 packages (e.g. tamago, anthy) or an input method via XIM.
595
596 ** Let LEIM handle the Mode_switch key like XIM does (i.e. a toggle like C-\
597 but which can also be used as a modifier).
598
599 ** Improve Help buffers: Change the face of previously visited links (like
600 Info, but also with regard to namespace), and give the value of
601 lisp expressions, e.g auto-mode-alist, the right face.
602
603 ** Possibly make `list-holidays' eval items in the calendar-holidays variable.
604 See thread
605 <http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2006-02/msg01034.html>.
606 [rgm@gnu.org will look at this after 22.1]
607
608 ** Possibly make cal-dst use the system timezone database directly.
609 See thread
610 <http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-pretest-bug/2006-11/msg00060.html>
611
612 ** Possibly add a "close" button to the modeline.
613 The idea is to add an "X" of some kind, that when clicked deletes
614 the window associated with that modeline.
615 http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2007-09/msg02416.html
616
617 * Things to be done for specific packages or features
618
619 ** NeXTstep port
620
621 *** Bugs
622
623 **** (mouse-avoidance-mode 'banish) then minimize Emacs, will pop window back
624 up on top of all others
625
626 **** free_frame_resources, face colors
627
628 **** Numeric keysetting bug.
629
630 *** Mac-related
631
632 **** Open file:/// URLs.
633
634 **** Put frame autopositioning into C code somewhere -- if loc = same, offset.
635
636 **** Automap ctrl-mouse-1 to mouse-3.
637
638 **** Deal with Finder aliases somehow.
639
640 **** Ctrl-F2 won't pull up menus.
641
642 *** Other / Low Priority:
643
644 **** Better recognition of unicode scripts / Greek / composition.
645
646 **** Undo for color-drag face customization.
647
648 ** ImageMagick support
649
650 *** image-type-header-regexps priorities the jpeg loader over the
651 ImageMagick one. This is not wrong, but how should a user go about
652 prefering the ImageMagick loader? The user might like zooming etc in jpegs.
653
654 Try (setq image-type-header-regexps nil) for a quick hack to prefer
655 ImageMagick over the jpg loader.
656
657 *** For some reason its unbearably slow to look at a page in a large
658 image bundle using the :index feature. The ImageMagick "display"
659 command is also a bit slow, but nowhere near as slow as the Emacs
660 code. It seems ImageMagick tries to unpack every page when loading the
661 bundle. This feature is not the primary usecase in Emacs though.
662
663 ImageMagick 6.6.2-9 introduced a bugfix for single page djvu load. It
664 is now much faster to use the :index feature, but still not very fast.
665
666 *** Try to cache the num pages calculation. It can take a while to
667 calculate the number of pages, and if you need to do it for each page
668 view, page-flipping becomes uselessly slow.
669
670 *** Integrate with image-dired.
671
672 *** Integrate with docview.
673
674 *** Integrate with image-mode.
675 Some work has been done, e.g. M-x image-transform-fit-to-height will
676 fit the image to the height of the Emacs window.
677
678 *** Look for optimizations for handling images with low depth.
679 Currently the code seems to default to 24 bit RGB which is costly for
680 images with lower bit depth.
681
682 *** Decide what to do with some uncommitted imagemagick support
683 functions for image size etc.
684
685 *** Test with more systems.
686 Tested on Fedora 12, 14, and the libmagick that ships with it.
687 I also tried using an ImageMagick compiled from their SVN, in
688 parallel with the one packaged by Fedora, it worked well.
689 Ubuntu 8.04 was tested, but it seems it ships a broken ImageMagick.
690
691 ** nxml mode
692
693 *** High priority
694
695 **** Command to insert an element template, including all required
696 attributes and child elements. When there's a choice of elements
697 possible, we could insert a comment, and put an overlay on that
698 comment that makes it behave like a button with a pop-up menu to
699 select the appropriate choice.
700
701 **** Command to tag a region. With a schema should complete using legal
702 tags, but should work without a schema as well.
703
704 **** Provide a way to conveniently rename an element. With a schema should
705 complete using legal tags, but should work without a schema as well.
706
707 *** Outlining
708
709 **** Implement C-c C-o C-q.
710
711 **** Install pre/post command hook for moving out of invisible section.
712
713 **** Put a modify hook on invisible sections that expands them.
714
715 **** Integrate dumb folding somehow.
716
717 **** An element should be able to be its own heading.
718
719 **** Optimize to avoid complete buffer scan on each command.
720
721 **** Make it work with HTML-style headings (i.e. level indicated by
722 name of heading element rather than depth of section nesting).
723
724 **** Recognize root element as a section provided it has a title, even
725 if it doesn't match section-element-name-regex.
726
727 **** Support for incremental search automatically making hidden text visible.
728
729 **** Allow title to be an attribute.
730
731 **** Command that says to recognize the tag at point as a section/heading.
732
733 **** Explore better ways to determine when an element is a section
734 or a heading.
735
736 **** rng-next-error needs to either ignore invisible portion or reveal it
737 (maybe use isearch oriented text properties).
738
739 **** Errors within hidden section should be highlighted by underlining the
740 ellipsis.
741
742 **** Make indirect buffers work.
743
744 **** How should nxml-refresh outline recover from non well-formed tags?
745
746 **** Hide tags in title elements?
747
748 **** Use overlays instead of text properties for holding outline state?
749 Necessary for indirect buffers to work?
750
751 **** Allow an outline to go in the speedbar.
752
753 **** Split up outlining manual section into subsections.
754
755 **** More detail in the manual about each outlining command.
756
757 **** More menu entries for hiding/showing?
758
759 **** Indication of many lines have been hidden?
760
761 *** Locating schemas
762
763 **** Should rng-validate-mode give the user an opportunity to specify a
764 schema if there is currently none? Or should it at least give a hint
765 to the user how to specify a non-vacuous schema?
766
767 **** Support for adding new schemas to schema-locating files.
768 Add documentElement and namespace elements.
769
770 **** C-c C-w should be able to report current type id.
771
772 **** Implement doctypePublicId.
773
774 **** Implement typeIdBase.
775
776 **** Implement typeIdProcessingInstruction.
777
778 **** Support xml:base.
779
780 **** Implement group.
781
782 **** Find preferred prefix from schema-locating files. Get rid of
783 rng-preferred-prefix-alist.
784
785 **** Inserting document element with vacuous schema should complete using
786 document elements declared in schema locating files, and set schema
787 appropriately.
788
789 **** Add a ruleType attribute to the <include> element?
790
791 **** Allow processing instruction in prolog to contain the compact syntax
792 schema directly.
793
794 **** Use RDDL to locate a schema based on the namespace URI.
795
796 **** Should not prompt to add redundant association to schema locating file.
797
798 **** Command to reload current schema.
799
800 *** Schema-sensitive features
801
802 **** Should filter dynamic markup possibilities using schema validity, by
803 adding hook to nxml-mode.
804
805 **** Dynamic markup word should (at least optionally) be able to look in
806 other buffers that are using nxml-mode.
807
808 **** Should clicking on Invalid move to next error if already on an error?
809
810 **** Take advantage of a:documentation. Needs change to schema format.
811
812 **** Provide feasible validation (as in Jing) toggle.
813
814 **** Save the validation state as a property on the error overlay to enable
815 more detailed diagnosis.
816
817 **** Provide an Error Summary buffer showing all the validation errors.
818
819 **** Pop-up menu. What is useful? Tag a region (should be greyed out if
820 the region is not balanced). Suggestions based on error messages.
821
822 **** Have configurable list of namespace URIs so that we can provide
823 namespace URI completion on extension elements or with schema-less documents.
824
825 **** Allow validation to handle XInclude.
826
827 **** ID/IDREF support.
828
829 *** Completion
830
831 **** Make it work with icomplete. Only use a function to complete when
832 some of the possible names have undeclared namespaces.
833
834 **** How should C-return in mixed text work?
835
836 **** When there's a vacuous schema, C-return after < will insert the end-tag.
837 Is this a bug or a feature?
838
839 **** After completing start-tag, ensure we don't get unhelpful message
840 from validation
841
842 **** Syntax table for completion.
843
844 **** Should complete start-tag name with a space if namespace attributes
845 are required.
846
847 **** When completing start-tag name with no prefix and it doesn't match
848 should try to infer namespace from local name.
849
850 **** Should completion pay attention to characters after point? If so, how?
851
852 **** When completing start-tag name, add required atts if only one required
853 attribute.
854
855 **** When completing attribute name, add attribute value if only one value
856 is possible.
857
858 **** After attribute-value completion, insert space after close delimiter
859 if more attributes are required.
860
861 **** Complete on enumerated data values in elements.
862
863 **** When in context that allows only elements, should get tag
864 completion without having to type < first.
865
866 **** When immediately after start-tag name, and name is valid and not
867 prefix of any other name, should C-return complete on attribute names?
868
869 **** When completing attributes, more consistent to ignore all attributes
870 after point.
871
872 **** Inserting attribute value completions needs to be sensitive to what
873 delimiter is used so that it quotes the correct character.
874
875 **** Complete on encoding-names in XML decl.
876
877 **** Complete namespace declarations by searching for all namespaces
878 mentioned in the schema.
879
880 *** Well-formed XML support
881
882 **** Deal better with Mule-UCS
883
884 **** Deal with UTF-8 BOM when reading.
885
886 **** Complete entity names.
887
888 **** Provide some support for entity names for MathML.
889
890 **** Command to repeat the last tag.
891
892 **** Support for changing between character references and characters.
893 Need to check that context is one in which character references are
894 allowed. xmltok prolog parsing will need to distinguish parameter
895 literals from other kinds of literal.
896
897 **** Provide a comment command to bind to M-; that works better than the
898 normal one.
899
900 **** Make indenting in a multi-line comment work.
901
902 **** Structure view. Separate buffer displaying element tree.
903 Be able to navigate from structure view to document and vice-versa.
904
905 **** Flash matching >.
906
907 **** Smart selection command that selects increasingly large syntactically
908 coherent chunks of XML. If point is in an attribute value, first
909 select complete value; then if command is repeated, select value plus
910 delimiters, then select attribute name as well, then complete
911 start-tag, then complete element, then enclosing element, etc.
912
913 **** ispell integration.
914
915 **** Block-level items in mixed content should be indented, e.g:
916 <para>This is list:
917 <ul>
918 <li>item</li>
919
920 **** Provide option to indent like this:
921 <para>This is a paragraph
922 occupying multiple lines.</para>
923
924 **** Option to add make a / that closes a start-tag electrically insert a
925 space for the XHTML guys.
926
927 **** C-M-q should work.
928
929 *** Datatypes
930
931 **** Figure out workaround for CJK characters with regexps.
932
933 **** Does category C contain Cn?
934
935 **** Do ENTITY datatype properly.
936
937 *** XML Parsing Library
938
939 **** Parameter entity parsing option, nil (never), t (always),
940 unless-standalone (unless standalone="yes" in XML declaration).
941
942 **** When a file is currently being edited, there should be an option to
943 use its buffer instead of the on-disk copy.
944
945 *** Handling all XML features
946
947 **** Provide better support for editing external general parsed entities.
948 Perhaps provide a way to force ignoring undefined entities; maybe turn
949 this on automatically with <?xml encoding=""?> (with no version
950 pseudo-att).
951
952 **** Handle internal general entity declarations containing elements.
953
954 **** Handle external general entity declarations.
955
956 **** Handle default attribute declarations in internal subset.
957
958 **** Handle parameter entities (including DTD).
959
960 *** RELAX NG
961
962 **** Do complete schema checking, at least optionally.
963
964 **** Detect include/external loops during schema parse.
965
966 **** Coding system detection for schemas. Should use utf-8/utf-16 per the
967 spec. But also need to allow encodings other than UTF-8/16 to support
968 CJK charsets that Emacs cannot represent in Unicode.
969
970 *** Catching XML errors
971
972 **** Check public identifiers.
973
974 **** Check default attribute values.
975
976 *** Performance
977
978 **** Explore whether overlay-recenter can cure overlays performance problems.
979
980 **** Cache schemas. Need to have list of files and mtimes.
981
982 **** Make it possible to reduce rng-validate-chunk-size significantly,
983 perhaps to 500 bytes, without bad performance impact: don't do
984 redisplay on every chunk; pass continue functions on other uses of
985 rng-do-some-validation.
986
987 **** Cache after first tag.
988
989 **** Introduce a new name class that is a choice between names (so that
990 we can use member)
991
992 **** intern-choice should simplify after patterns with same 1st/2nd args
993
994 **** Large numbers of overlays slow things down dramatically. Represent
995 errors using text properties. This implies we cannot incrementally
996 keep track of the number of errors, in order to determine validity.
997 Instead, when validation completes, scan for any characters with an
998 error text property; this seems to be fast enough even with large
999 buffers. Problem with error at end of buffer, where there's no
1000 character; need special variable for this. Need to merge face from
1001 font-lock with the error face: use :inherit attribute with list of two
1002 faces. How do we avoid making rng-valid depend on nxml-mode?
1003
1004 *** Error recovery
1005
1006 **** Don't stop at newline in looking for close of start-tag.
1007
1008 **** Use indentation to guide recovery from mismatched end-tags
1009
1010 **** Don't keep parsing when currently not well-formed but previously
1011 well-formed
1012
1013 **** Try to recover from a bad start-tag by popping an open element if
1014 there was a mismatched end-tag unaccounted for.
1015
1016 **** Try to recover from a bad start-tag open on the hypothesis that there
1017 was an error in the namespace URI.
1018
1019 **** Better recovery from ill-formed XML declarations.
1020
1021 *** Useability improvements
1022
1023 **** Should print a "Parsing..." message during long movements.
1024
1025 **** Provide better position for reference to undefined pattern error.
1026
1027 **** Put Well-formed in the mode-line when validating against any-content.
1028
1029 **** Trim marking of illegal data for leading and trailing whitespace.
1030
1031 **** Show Invalid status as soon as we are sure it's invalid, rather than
1032 waiting for everything to be completely up to date.
1033
1034 **** When narrowed, Valid or Invalid status should probably consider only
1035 validity of narrowed region.
1036
1037 *** Bug fixes
1038
1039 **** Need to give an error for a document like: <foo/><![CDATA[ ]]>
1040
1041 **** Make nxml-forward-balanced-item work better for the prolog.
1042
1043 **** Make filling and indenting comments work in the prolog.
1044
1045 **** Should delete RNC Input buffers.
1046
1047 **** Figure out what regex use for NCName and use it consistently,
1048
1049 **** Should have not-well-formed tokens in ref.
1050
1051 **** Require version in XML declaration? Probably not because prevents
1052 use for external parsed entities. At least forbid standalone without version.
1053
1054 **** Reject schema that compiles to rng-not-allowed-ipattern.
1055
1056 **** Move point backwards on schema parse error so that it's on the right token.
1057
1058 *** Internal
1059
1060 **** Use rng-quote-string consistently.
1061
1062 **** Use parsing library for XML to texinfo conversion.
1063
1064 **** Rename xmltok.el to nxml-token.el. Use nxml-t- prefix instead of
1065 xmltok-. Change nxml-t-type to nxml-t-token-type, nxml-t-start to
1066 nxml-t-token-start.
1067
1068 **** Can we set fill-prefix to nil and rely on indenting?
1069
1070 **** xmltok should make available replacement text of entities containing
1071 elements
1072
1073 **** In rng-valid, instead of using modification-hooks and
1074 insert-behind-hooks on dependent overlays, use same technique as nxml-mode.
1075
1076 **** Port to XEmacs. Issues include: Unicode (XEmacs seems to be based on
1077 Mule-UCS); overlays/text properties vs extents; absence of
1078 fontification-functions hook.
1079
1080 *** Fontification
1081
1082 **** Allow face to depend on element qname, attribute qname, attribute
1083 value. Use list with pairs of (R . F), where R specifies regexps and
1084 F specifies faces. How can this list be made to depend on the document type?
1085
1086 *** Other
1087
1088 **** Support RELAX NG XML syntax (use XML parsing library).
1089
1090 **** Support W3C XML Schema (use XML parsing library).
1091
1092 **** Command to infer schema from current document (like trang).
1093
1094 *** Schemas
1095
1096 **** XSLT schema should take advantage of RELAX NG to express cooccurrence
1097 constraints on attributes (e.g. xsl:template).
1098
1099 *** Documentation
1100
1101 **** Move material from README to manual.
1102
1103 **** Document encodings.
1104
1105 *** Notes
1106
1107 **** How can we allow an error to be displayed on a different token from
1108 where it is detected? In particular, for a missing closing ">" we
1109 will need to display it at the beginning of the following token. At the
1110 moment, when we parse the following token the error overlay will get cleared.
1111
1112 **** How should rng-goto-next-error deal with narrowing?
1113
1114 **** Perhaps should merge errors having same start position even if they
1115 have different ends.
1116
1117 **** How to handle surrogates? One possibility is to be compatible with
1118 utf8.e: represent as sequence of 4 chars. But utf-16 is incompatible
1119 with this.
1120
1121 **** Should we distinguish well-formedness errors from invalidity errors?
1122 (I think not: we may want to recover from a bad start-tag by implying
1123 an end-tag.)
1124
1125 **** Seems to be a bug with Emacs, where a mouse movement that causes
1126 help-echo text to appear counts as pending input but does not cause
1127 idle timer to be restarted.
1128
1129 **** Use XML to represent this file.
1130
1131 **** I had a TODO which said simply "split-string". What did I mean?
1132
1133 **** Investigate performance on large files all on one line.
1134
1135 *** Issues for Emacs versions >= 22
1136
1137 **** Take advantage of UTF-8 CJK support.
1138
1139 **** Supply a next-error-function.
1140
1141 **** Investigate this NEWS item "Emacs now tries to set up buffer coding
1142 systems for HTML/XML files automatically."
1143
1144 **** Take advantage of the pointer text property.
1145
1146 **** Leverage char-displayable-p.
1147
1148 * Internal changes
1149
1150 ** Cleanup all the GC_ mark bit stuff -- there is no longer any distinction
1151 since the mark bit is no longer stored in the Lisp_Object itself.
1152
1153 ** Refine the `predicate' arg to read-file-name.
1154 Currently, it mixes up the predicate to apply when doing completion and the
1155 one to use when terminating the selection.
1156
1157 ** Merge ibuffer.el and buff-menu.el.
1158 More specifically do what's needed to make ibuffer.el the default,
1159 or just an extension of buff-menu.el.
1160
1161 ** Use pcomplete by default in shell-mode.
1162 This means to make it behave (by default) more like the current code.
1163 Use it also for read-shell-command, M-x compile, ...
1164
1165 ** Merge sendmail.el and messages.el.
1166 Probably not a complete merge, but at least arrange for messages.el to be
1167 a derived mode of sendmail.el. Or arrange for messages.el to be split
1168 into a small core and "the rest" so that we use less resources as long as
1169 we stick to the features provided in sendmail.el.
1170
1171 ** Replace gmalloc.c with the modified Doug Lea code from the current
1172 GNU libc so that the special mmapping of buffers can be removed --
1173 that apparently loses under Solaris, at least. [fx has mostly done
1174 this.]
1175
1176 ** Rewrite make-docfile to be clean and maintainable.
1177
1178 ** Add an inferior-comint-minor-mode to capture the common set of operations
1179 offered by major modes that offer an associated inferior
1180 comint-derived mode. I.e. basically make cmuscheme.el/inf-lisp.el generic.
1181 For use by sml-mode, python-mode, tex-mode, scheme-mode, lisp-mode,
1182 haskell-mode, tuareg-mode, ...
1183
1184 ** Make SYNC_INPUT the default. [true since 2008-03-11]
1185 All loops using immediate_quit need to be checked to ensure that
1186 C-g can interrupt them, in case of an infinite loop. Once we
1187 switch to using SYNC_INPUT, we can remove the BLOCK_INPUTs in the
1188 allocation functions (allocate_string etc.) without worrying about
1189 data munging.
1190
1191 ** Add "link" button class
1192 Add a standard button-class named "link", and make all other link-like
1193 button classes inherit from it. Set the default face of the "link" button
1194 class to the standard "link" face.
1195
1196 * Other known bugs:
1197
1198 ** `make-frame' forgets unhandled parameters, at least for X11 frames.
1199
1200 ** a two-char comment-starter whose two chars are symbol constituents will
1201 not be noticed if it appears within a word.
1202
1203 ** Fix unexelf.c to handle the .data.rel and .data.rel.local
1204 sections made by GCC 3.4 on IRIX.
1205
1206 \f
1207 This file is part of GNU Emacs.
1208
1209 GNU Emacs is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
1210 it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
1211 the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
1212 (at your option) any later version.
1213
1214 GNU Emacs is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
1215 but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
1216 MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
1217 GNU General Public License for more details.
1218
1219 You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
1220 along with GNU Emacs. If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.
1221