1 Emacs TODO List -*-outline-*-
3 Copyright (C) 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007
4 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
5 See the end of the file for license conditions.
8 If you are ready to start working on any of these TODO items, we
9 appreciate your help; please write to emacs-devel@gnu.org so we can be
10 aware that the problem is being addressed, and talk with you how to do
11 it best. Since Emacs is an FSF-copyrighted package, please be
12 prepared to sign legal papers to transfer the copyright on your work
15 * Small but important fixes needed in existing features:
17 ** mouse-autoselect-window should wait to select the window until
18 the mouse is put to rest or after a delay or both, so that moving over
19 a window doesn't select it.
21 ** In C-x d, the default if you type RET should be the directory name,
22 but if you type M-n you should get the visited file name of the
25 ** describe-face should show an example of text in the face.
27 ** Distribute a bar cursor of width > 1 evenly between the two glyphs
28 on each side of the bar (what to do at the edges?).
30 ** Make vc-checkin avoid reverting the buffer if has not changed after
31 the checkin. Comparing (md5 BUFFER) to (md5 FILE) should be enough.
33 ** buffer-offer-save should be a permanent local.
35 ** revert-buffer should eliminate overlays and the mark.
37 ** erase-buffer should perhaps disregard read-only properties of text.
39 ** Make occur correctly handle matches that span more than one line,
40 as well as overlapping matches.
42 ** Fix the kill/yank treatment of invisible text. At the moment,
43 invisible text is placed in the kill-ring, so that the contents of
44 the ring may not correspond to the text as displayed to the user.
45 It ought to be possible to omit text which is invisible (due to a
46 text-property, overlay, or selective display) from the kill-ring.
48 ** Change the way define-minor-mode handles autoloading.
49 It should not generate :require. Or :require in defcustom
50 should not be recorded in the user's custom-set-variables call.
52 ** Feature to change cursor shape when Emacs is idle (for more than
55 ** The buttons at the top of a custom buffer should not omit
56 variables whose values are currently hidden.
58 ** Clean up the variables in browse-url. Perhaps use a shell command string to
59 specify the browser instead of the mushrooming set of functions.
60 See also ESR's proposal for a BROWSER environment variable
61 <URL:http://www.catb.org/~esr/BROWSER/browse-url.patch>.
63 ** Enhance scroll-bar to handle tall line (similar to line-move).
65 ** Make occur handle multi-line matches cleanly with context.
67 ** In Custom buffers, put the option that turns a mode on or off first,
68 using a heuristic of some kind?
70 ** Define recompute-arg and recompute-arg-if for fix_command to use.
71 See rms message of 11 Dec 05.
73 ** Height returned by frame-parameter ... and height given to
74 make-frame does not mean the same thing. The former includes menu and
75 tool bar lines, the latter don't. frame-parameter should return height
76 without menu and tool bar lines.
78 ** In Emacs Info, examples of using Customize should be clickable
79 and they should create Custom buffers.
81 ** The toolbar should show keyboard equivalents in its tooltips.
83 ** Add function to redraw the tool bar.
85 ** Modify allout.el to use overlays, like outline.el.
87 ** M-! M-n should fetch the buffer-file-name as the default.
89 ** Redesign the load-history data structure so it can cope better
90 with evaluating definitions of the same function from different files,
91 recording which file the latest definition came from.
93 ** make back_comment use syntax-ppss or equivalent.
97 ** Provide user-friendly ways to list all available font families,
98 list fonts, display a font as a sample, etc. [fx is looking at
99 multilingual font selection for the Unicode branch of Emacs.]
101 ** Provide a convenient way to select a color with the mouse.
103 ** Rewrite the face code to be simpler, clearer and faster.
105 ** Program Enriched mode to read and save in RTF. [Is there actually a
106 decent single definition of RTF? Maybe see info at
107 http://latex2rtf.sourceforge.net/.] This task seems to be addressed
108 by http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/emacs-rtf/, which is still in
111 ** Implement something better than the current Refill mode. This
112 probably needs some primitive support.
114 ** Add a command to make a "Local Variables" section in the current buffer
115 and/or add a variable to the list.
117 ** Implement primitive and higher-level functions to allow filling
118 properly with variable-pitch faces.
120 ** Implement a smoother vertical scroll facility, one that allows
121 C-v to scroll through a tall image. The primitive operations
122 posn-at-point and posn-at-x-y should now make it doable in elisp.
124 ** Implement intelligent search/replace, going beyond query-replace
125 (see http://graphics.csail.mit.edu/~rcm/chi04.pdf).
127 ** Implement other text formatting properties.
128 *** Footnotes that can appear either in place or at the end of the page.
129 *** text property that says "don't break line in middle of this".
130 Don't break the line between two characters that have the
131 same value of this property.
132 *** Discretionary hyphens that are not visible when they are at end of line.
134 ** Internationalize Emacs's messages.
136 ** Set up a facility to save backtraces when errors happen during
137 specified filters, specified timers, and specified hooks.
139 ** Install mmc@maruska.dyndns.org's no-flicker change.
141 ** Add a "current vertical pixel level" value that goes with point,
142 so that motion commands can also move through tall images.
143 This value would be to point as window-vscroll is to window-start.
145 ** Address internationalization of symbols names essentially
146 as documentation, e.g. in command names and Custom.
148 ** Make the Lucid menu widget display multilingual text. [This
149 probably needs to be done from actual Emacs buffers, either directly
150 in the menu or by rendering in an unmapped window and copying the
151 pixels. The current code assumes a specific locale; that isn't good
152 enough even if X can render the arbitrary text] [The gtk
153 port now displays multilingual text in menus, but only insofar as
154 Emacs can encode it as utf-8 and gtk can display the result.]
155 Maybe making Lucid menus work like Gtk's (i.e. just force utf-8) is good
156 enough now that Emacs can encode most chars into utf-8.
158 ** Remove the limitation that window and frame widths and heights can
159 be only full columns/lines.
161 * Other features we would like:
163 ** Remove the default toggling behavior of minor modes when called from elisp
164 rather than interactively. This a trivial one-liner in easy-mode.el.
165 ** Create a category of errors called `user-error' for errors which are
166 typically due to pilot errors and should thus be in debug-ignored-errors.
168 ** Give Tar mode all the features of Archive mode.
170 ** Create a category of errors called `process-error'
171 for some or all errors associated with using subprocesses.
173 ** Maybe reinterpret `parse-error' as a category of errors
174 and put some other errors under it.
176 ** A function to tell you the argument pattern of functions.
177 See `function-arity' in http://www.loveshack.ukfsn.org/emacs/fx-misc.el.
179 ** Make byte-compile warn when a doc string is too wide.
181 ** A function to check for customizable options that have been
182 set but not saved, and ask the user whether to save them.
183 This could go in kill-emacs-query-functions, to remind people
184 to save their changes. If the user says yes, show them
185 in a Custom buffer using customize-customized.
187 ** Record the sxhash of the default value for customized variables
188 and notify the user (maybe by adding a menu item or toolbar button,
189 as the detection can occur during autoload time) when the default
190 changes (meaning that new versions of the Lisp source with a changed
191 default value got installed) and offer ediff on the respective
192 customization buffers.
194 ** Emacs Lisp mode could put an overlay on the defun for every
195 function that has advice. The overlay could have `after-text' like
196 " [Function has advice]". It might look like (defun foo [Function
197 has advice] (x y) The overlay could also be a button that you could
198 use to view the advice.
200 ** Add a function to get the insertion-type of the markers in an overlay.
204 This is hard to make work because sftp doesn't print status
207 *** Use MLS for ange-ftp-insert-directory if a list of files is specified.
209 ** Ability to map a key, including all modified-combinations.
210 E.g map mouse-4 to wheel-up as well as M-mouse-4 -> M-wheel-up
211 M-C-mouse-4 -> M-C-wheel-up, H-S-C-M-s-double-mouse-4 ->
212 H-S-C-M-s-double-wheel-up, ...
214 ** Beefed-up syntax-tables.
215 *** recognize multi-character syntactic entities like `begin' and `end'.
216 *** nested string-delimiters (for Postscript's (foo(bar)baz) strings).
217 *** support for infix operators (with precedence).
218 *** support for the $ (paired delimiter) in parse-partial-sexp.
219 *** support for hook-chars whose effect on the parsing-state is specified
220 by elisp code. Thus a char could both close a string and open a comment
221 at the same time and do it in a context-sensitive way.
222 *** ability to add mode-specific data to the partial-parse-state.
224 ** Add a way to convert a keyboard macro to equivalent Lisp code.
226 ** Have a command suggestion help system that recognizes patterns
227 of commands which could be replaced with a simpler common command.
228 It should not make more than one suggestion per 10 minutes.
230 ** Add a way to define input methods by computing them (when first used)
231 from other input methods. Then redefine C-x 8 to use a
232 user-selected input method, with the default being the union of
233 latin-1-prefix and latin-1-postfix.
235 ** Switch the Windows port to using Unicode keyboard input (maybe).
236 Based on http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms633586.aspx,
237 this boils down to (1) calling RegisterClassW function to register
238 Emacs windows, and (2) modifying ALL system messages to use Unicode.
239 In particular, WM_CHAR messages, which result from keyboard input,
240 will then come in encoded in UTF-16.
242 One advantage of switching to Unicode is to toss encoded-kbd usage,
243 which will solve the problem with binding non-ASCII keys with
246 Problem: using this on Windows 9x/ME requires installing the
247 Microsoft Layer for Unicode (MSLU), which might not implement all
248 the required functionality that is available built-in on Windows XP
249 and later. We should not make this change if it would pressure
250 users of unauthorized copies of older versions of Windows to
251 downgrade to versions that require activation.
253 ** Implement a clean way to use different major modes for
254 different parts of a buffer. This could be useful in editing
255 Bison input files, for instance, or other kinds of text
256 where one language is embedded in another language. See
257 http://www.loveshack.ukfsn.org/emacs/multi-mode.el and also
258 mmm-mode, as reference for approaches took by others.
260 ** Arrange a way for an input method to return the first character
261 immediately, then replace it later. So that C-s a with
262 input method latin-1-postfix would immediately search for an a.
264 ** Give start-process the ability to direct standard-error
265 output to a different filter.
267 ** Make desktop.el save the "frame configuration" of Emacs (in some
270 ** Give desktop.el a feature to switch between different named
273 ** Replace finder.el with something that generates an Info file
274 which gives the same information through a menu structure. [Dave
275 Love started on this.]
277 ** Add a cpio mode, more or less like tar mode.
279 ** Implement a variant of uncompress.el or jka-compr.el that works with
280 GNU Privacy Guard for encryption. [Code exists but isn't assigned.
281 See the Gnus development sources for assigned code concerning GPG
282 use with mail, which is probably a good start.] See also
283 http://www.loveshack.ukfsn.org/emacs/auto-crypt.tgz.
285 ** Save undo information in special temporary files, and reload it
286 when needed for undoing. This could extend undo capacity.
288 ** Change the Windows NT menu code
289 so that it handles the deep_p argument and avoids
290 regenerating the whole menu bar menu tree except
291 when the user tries to use the menubar.
293 This requires the RIT to forward the WM_INITMENU message to
294 the main thread, and not return from that message until the main
295 thread has processed the MENU_BAR_ACTIVATE_EVENT and regenerated
296 the whole menu bar. In the mean time, it should process other messages.
298 ** Get some major packages installed: W3 (development version needs
299 significant work), PSGML. Check the assignments file for other
300 packages which might go in and have been missed.
302 ** Make keymaps a first-class Lisp object (this means a rewrite of
303 keymap.c). What should it do apart from being opaque ?
304 multiple inheritance ? faster where-is ? no more fix_submap_inheritance ?
307 ** Provide real menus on ttys. The MS-DOS implementation can serve as
308 an example how to do part of this; see the XMenu* functions on msdos.c.
310 ** Implement popular parts of the rest of the CL functions as compiler
313 ** Make compiler warnings about functions that might be undefined at run time
314 smarter, so that they know which files are required by the file being
315 compiled and don't warn about functions defined in them.
317 ** Highlight rectangles (`mouse-track-rectangle-p' in XEmacs). Already in CUA,
318 but it's a valuable feature worth making more general.
320 ** Support simultaneous tty and X frames. [See the multi-tty branch of Emacs
321 at http://lorentey.hu/project/emacs.]
323 ** Provide MIME support for Rmail using the Gnus MIME library. [Maybe
324 not now feasible, given Gnus maintenance decisions. fx looked at
325 this and can say where some of the problems are.]
327 ** Eliminate the storm of warnings concerning char/unsigned char
328 mismatches that we get with GCC 4.x and proprietary compilers on
329 various systems. They make it difficult to spot the important
332 ** Fix anything necessary to use `long long' EMACS_INTs with GCC.
334 ** Split out parts of lisp.h and generate Makefile dependencies
339 ** Allow auto-compression-mode to use zlib calls if zlib is available.
340 [It's required for PNG, so may be linked anyhow.]
342 ** Add a --pristine startup flag which does -q --no-site-file plus
343 ignoring X resources (Doze equivalents?) and most of the
344 environment. What should not be ignored needs consideration.
346 ** Improve the GC (generational, incremental). (We may be able to use
347 the Boehm collector.) [See the Boehm-GC branch in CVS for work on
350 ** Check what hooks would help Emacspeak -- see the defadvising in W3.
352 ** Add definitions for symbol properties, for documentation purposes.
354 ** Add horizontal scroll bars.
356 ** Provide an optional feature which computes a scroll bar slider's
357 size and its position from lines instead of characters.
359 ** Add support for SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) rendering to
362 ** Allow unknown image types to be rendered via an external program
363 converting them to, say, PBM (in the same way as PostScript?).
365 ** Display images with alpha channels, such as png, with the current
366 background color of whatever frame it is displayed in. Currently, we
367 use the default background color if specified in the png file, or, if
368 that is unspecified, the background color of the frame in which the
369 image was first created. Ideally, the image should display the
370 background color of whichever frame it is being displayed in. The
371 main complication is that this will require the loading of a new image
372 object for each different background color.
374 ** Allow displaying an X window from an external program in a buffer,
375 e.g. to render graphics from Java applets. [gerd and/or wmperry
376 thought this was feasible.]
378 ** Allow images (not just text) in the margin to be mouse-sensitive.
379 (Requires recursing through display properties). Provide some way
380 to simulate mouse-clicks on marginal text without a mouse.
382 ** Implement Lisp functions to determine properly whether a character
383 is displayable (particularly needed in XFree 4, sigh). Use it to
384 define useful glyphs that may be displayed as images or unicodes
385 (with ASCIIfied fallback via latin1-disp). Examples include
386 box-drawing graphics in Custom buffers, W3 rules and tables, and
387 tree displays generally, mode-line mail indicator. [See work done
388 already for Emacs 22 and consult fx.]
390 ** Do something to make rms happy with fx's dynamic loading, and use it
391 to implement things like auto-loaded buffer parsers and database
392 access in cases which need more than Lisp.
394 ** Extend ps-print to deal with multiple font sizes, images, and extra
397 ** Provide portable undumping using mmap (per gerd design).
399 ** Make byte-compile avoid binding an expanded defsubst's args
400 when the body only calls primitives.
402 ** Use the XIE X extension, if available, for image display.
404 ** Make monochrome images display using the foreground and background
405 colors of the applicable faces.
409 ** Make `format-time-string' preserve text properties like `format'.
411 ** Optionally make the cursor a little thinner at the end of a line
412 or the end of the buffer.
414 ** Add support for rendering antialiased text, probably using
417 ** Port the conservative stack marking code of Emacs' garbage collector
418 to more systems, so that we can completely get rid of GCPROs. Note
419 that Boehm garbage collector provides this.
421 ** Reorder defcustom's in each package so that the more important
422 options come first in the Customize buffers. This could be done by
423 either rearranging the file (since options are shown in the order
424 they appear in the *.el files), or by adding a few :set-after
427 ** Maybe document the features of libraries missing from the manual (or
428 ancillary manuals, including the Lisp manual in some cases).
429 This is not worth doing for all of these packages and we need not
430 aim for completeness, but some may be worth documenting.
432 Here's a list which is probably not complete/correct: align, allout,
433 artist, ansi-color, array, battery, calculator, cdl, cmuscheme,
434 completion, cua, delim-col, dirtrack, double, echistory, elide-head,
435 easymenu, expand, flow-ctrl, format [format-alist],
436 generic/generic-x [various modes], kermit, log-edit, ledit
437 [obsolete?], makesum, midnight [other than in Kill Buffer node],
438 mouse-copy [?], mouse-drag, mouse-sel, net-utils, rcompile,
439 snmp-mode [?], soundex [should be interactive?], strokes [start from
440 the web page], talk, thingatpt [interactive functions?], type-break,
441 vcursor, xscheme, zone-mode [?], mlconvert [?], iso-cvt, iso-swed,
442 swedish, feedmail [?], uce, bruce, gametree, meese, page-ext,
443 refbib, refer, scribe, sgml-mode, spell, texinfo, underline,
444 cmacexp, hideif, mantemp [obsolete?], pcomplete, assoc, xml,
445 cvs-status (should be described in PCL-CVS manual); other progmodes,
446 probably in separate manual.
448 ** Convert the XPM bitmaps to PPM, replace the PBMs with them and scrap
449 the XPMs so that the colour versions work generally. (Requires care
450 with the colour used for the transparent regions.)
452 ** Convenient access to the `values' variable. It would be nice to have an
453 interface that would show you the printed reps of the elements of the
454 list in a menu, let you select one of the values, and put it into some
455 other variable, without changing the value of `values'.
457 ** (Controlled by a flag) make open and close syntax match exactly,
458 i.e. `(' doesn't match `]'.
460 ** Specify parameter ID-FORMAT in all calls to `file-attributes' and
461 `directory-files-and-attributes' where attributes UID or GID are used.
462 Whenever possible, use value 'string.
463 When done, change meaning of default value from 'integer to 'string.
464 If value 'integer is used nowhere, remove the parameter ID-FORMAT from
465 the definition of `file-attributes' and `directory-files-and-attributes'
468 ** Make language-info-alist customizable. Currently a user can customize
469 only the variable `current-language-environment'.
471 ** Improve language environment handling so that Emacs can fit
472 better to a users locale. Currently Emacs uses utf-8 language
473 environment for all utf-8 locales, thus a user in ja_JP.UTF-8 locale
474 are also put in utf-8 lang. env. In such a case, it is
475 better to use Japanese lang. env. but prefer utf-8 coding system.
477 ** Enhance locale handling: handle language, territory and charset
478 orthogonally and de-emphasize language environments. Use the locale
479 to set up more things, such as fontsets, the default Ispell
480 dictionary, diary format, calendar holidays and display, quoting
481 characters and phrase boundaries, sentence endings, collation for
482 sorting (at least for unicodes), HTTP Accept-language, patterns for
483 directory listings and compilation messages, yes-or-no replies,
484 common menu items when the toolkit supports it ... `locale-info'
485 needs extending for LC_COLLATE &c. [fx started on this.]
487 ** Eliminate the current restriction on header printing by ps-print.
488 Currently, a header can contain only single 1-byte charset in
491 ** In ps-print, provide an user friendly interface to specify fonts.
493 ** OpenType font support for various complex scripts (e.g. Devanagari).
494 As X protocal doesn't provide a way to access OpenType Layout Tables
495 in a OpenType font of a server side, we need a way to utilize local
496 fonts (perhaps by directly using the Freetype library or indirectly
499 ** Enhance word boundary detection for such a script that doesn't use
500 space at word boundary (e.g. Thai).
502 ** Implement interface programs with major Japanese conversion server
503 in lib-src so that they can be used from the input method
504 "japanese". Currently, most Japanese users are using external
505 packages (e.g. tamago, anthy) or an input method via XIM.
507 ** Let LEIM handle the Mode_switch key like XIM does (i.e. a toggle like C-\
508 but which can also be used as a modifier).
510 ** Provide the toolbar on ttys. This could map a bit like tmm-menubar
511 for the menubar and buttons could look a bit like those used by customize.
513 ** Improve Help buffers: Change the face of previously visited links (like
514 Info, but also with regard to namespace), add a forward button to make the
515 Help buffer more browser like and gives the value of lisp expressions
516 e.g auto-mode-alist, the right face. [nickrob@snap.net.nz has a patch
517 for this for inclusion after 22.1].
519 ** Possibly make `list-holidays' eval items in the calendar-holidays variable.
521 <http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2006-02/msg01034.html>.
522 [rgm@gnu.org will look at this after 22.1]
524 ** Possibly make cal-dst use the system timezone database directly.
526 <http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-pretest-bug/2006-11/msg00060.html>
530 ** Cleanup all the GC_ mark bit stuff -- there is no longer any distiction
531 since the mark bit is no longer stored in the Lisp_Object itself.
533 ** Merge ibuffer.el and buff-menu.el.
534 More specifically do what's needed to make ibuffer.el the default,
535 or just an extension of buff-menu.el.
537 ** Use pcomplete by default in shell-mode.
538 This means to make it behave (by default) more like the current code.
539 Use it also for read-shell-command, M-x compile, ...
541 ** Merge sendmail.el and messages.el.
542 Probably not a complete merge, but at least arrange for messages.el to be
543 a derived mode of sendmail.el. Or arrange for messages.el to be split
544 into a small core and "the rest" so that we use less resources as long as
545 we stick to the features provided in sendmail.el.
547 ** Replace gmalloc.c with the modified Doug Lea code from the current
548 GNU libc so that the special mmapping of buffers can be removed --
549 that apparently loses under Solaris, at least. [fx has mostly done
552 ** Rewrite make-docfile to be clean and maintainable.
554 ** Add an inferior-comint-minor-mode to capture the common set of operations
555 offered by major modes that offer an associated inferior
556 comint-derived mode. I.e. basically make cmuscheme.el/inf-lisp.el generic.
557 For use by sml-mode, python-mode, tex-mode, scheme-mode, lisp-mode,
558 haskell-mode, tuareg-mode, ...
560 ** Make SYNC_INPUT the default.
561 All loops using immediate_quit need to be checked to ensure that
562 C-g can interrupt them, in case of an infinite loop. Once we
563 switch to using SYNC_INPUT, we can remove the BLOCK_INPUTs in the
564 allocation functions (allocate_string etc.) without worrying about
567 ** Add "link" button class
568 Add a standard button-class named "link", and make all other link-like
569 button classes inherit from it. Set the default face of the "link" button
570 class to the standard "link" face.
574 ** a two-char comment-starter whose two chars are symbol constituents will
575 not be noticed if it appears within a word.
577 ** Fix unexelf.c to handle the .data.rel and .data.rel.local
578 sections made by GCC 3.4 on IRIX.
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598 ;;; arch-tag: b0a3e40b-726a-457d-9999-ba848321b036