Emacs TODO List -*-outline-*-
-Copyright (C) 2001-2011 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
+Copyright (C) 2001-2013 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
See the end of the file for license conditions.
If you are ready to start working on any of these TODO items, we
appreciate your help; please write to emacs-devel@gnu.org so we can be
aware that the problem is being addressed, and talk with you how to do
-it best. Since Emacs is an FSF-copyrighted package, please be
-prepared to sign legal papers to transfer the copyright on your work
-to the FSF.
+it best. Also to check that it hasn't been done already, since we
+don't always remember to update this file! It is best to consult
+the latest version of this file in the Emacs source code repository.
+
+Since Emacs is an FSF-copyrighted package, please be prepared to sign
+legal papers to transfer the copyright on your work to the FSF.
+For more details on this, see the section "Copyright Assignment"
+in etc/CONTRIBUTE. That file also contains some more practical
+details about getting involved.
+
+As well as the issues listed here, there are bug reports at
+<http://debbugs.gnu.org>. Bugs tagged "easy" ought to be suitable for
+beginners to work on, but unfortunately we are not very good at using
+this tag. Bugs tagged "help" are ones where assistance is required,
+but may be difficult to fix. Bugs with severity "important" or higher
+are the ones we consider more important, but these also may be
+difficult to fix. Bugs with severity "minor" may be simpler, but this
+is not always true.
* Tentative plan for Emacs-24
"which form of concurrency" we'll want.
** Overhaul of customize: sounds wonderful.
** better support for dynamic embedded graphics: I like this idea (my
- mpc.el code could use it for the volume widget), tho I wonder if the
+ mpc.el code could use it for the volume widget), though I wonder if the
resulting efficiency will be sufficient.
** Spread Semantic.
** Improve the "code snippets" support: consolidate skeleton.el, tempo.el,
and expand.el (any other?) and then advertise/use/improve it.
** Improve VC: yes, there's a lot of work to be done there :-(
- And most of it could/should make it into Emacs-23.3.
** Random things that cross my mind right now that I'd like to see (some of
them from my local hacks), but it's not obvious at all whether they'll
** Convert all defvars with leading `*' in the doc-strings into defcustoms
of appropriate :type and :group.
-** Remove any leading `*'s from defcustom doc-strings.
+** Remove any leading `*'s from defcustom doc-strings. [done?]
** Remove unnecessary autoload cookies from defcustoms.
This needs a bit of care, since often people have become used to
** See if other files can use generated-autoload-file (see eg ps-print).
+** Write more tests. Pick a fixed bug from the database, write a test
+case to make sure it stays fixed. Or pick your favorite programming
+major-mode, and write a test for its indentation. Or a version
+control backend, and write a test for its status parser. Etc.
+See test/automated for examples.
+
* Small but important fixes needed in existing features:
** Flymake's customization mechanism needs to be both simpler (fewer
command it will use.
I suggest totally rewriting that part of Flymake, using the simplest
-mechanism that sufficies for the specific needs. That will be easy
+mechanism that suffices for the specific needs. That will be easy
for users to customize.
** Compute the list of active keymaps *after* reading the first event.
** Remove the limitation that window and frame widths and heights can
be only full columns/lines.
-* Other features we would like:
+** The GNUstep port needs some serious attention, ideally from someone
+familiar with GNUstep and Objective C.
-** Make longlines-mode wrap lines based on screen position instead
- of character position, so that variable-width fonts can be handled
- properly.
+* Other features we would like:
** Allow frames(terminals) created by emacsclient to inherit their environment
from the emacsclient process.
** Remove the default toggling behavior of minor modes when called from elisp
rather than interactively. This a trivial one-liner in easy-mode.el.
-** Create a category of errors called `user-error' for errors which are
-typically due to pilot errors and should thus be in debug-ignored-errors.
-
** Give Tar mode all the features of Archive mode.
** Create a category of errors called `process-error'
Check the assignments file for other packages which might go in and
have been missed.
-** Possibly install python-mode in place of python.el, or combine the two.
-Someone needs to do the work of figuring out who all the non-trivial
-python-mode.el contributors are and getting assignments.
-http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2008-02/msg02156.html
-http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2008-02/msg02201.html
-http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2008-02/msg02489.html
-http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2008-02/msg02234.html
-
** Make keymaps a first-class Lisp object (this means a rewrite of
keymap.c). What should it do apart from being opaque ?
multiple inheritance ? faster where-is ? no more fix_submap_inheritance ?
an example how to do part of this; see the XMenu* functions on msdos.c.
** Implement popular parts of the rest of the CL functions as compiler
- macros in cl-macs.
+ macros in cl-macs. [Is this still relevant now that cl-lib exists?]
** Make compiler warnings about functions that might be undefined at run time
smarter, so that they know which files are required by the file being
** Highlight rectangles (`mouse-track-rectangle-p' in XEmacs). Already in CUA,
but it's a valuable feature worth making more general.
-** Provide MIME support for Rmail using the Gnus MIME library. [Maybe
- not now feasible, given Gnus maintenance decisions. fx looked at
- this and can say where some of the problems are.]
-
** Eliminate the storm of warnings concerning char/unsigned char
mismatches that we get with GCC 4.x and proprietary compilers on
various systems. They make it difficult to spot the important warnings.
** Fix anything necessary to use `long long' EMACS_INTs with GCC.
-** Split out parts of lisp.h [and generate Makefile dependencies automatically.]
-[the last bit is done, see DEPFLAGS etc in src/Makefile.in ]
+** Split out parts of lisp.h.
** Update the FAQ.
** Allow unknown image types to be rendered via an external program
converting them to, say, PBM (in the same way as PostScript?). [does
- doc-view.el do this, or could it be extended to do this?]
+ doc-view.el do this, or could it be extended to do this?
+ Does ImageMagick obsolete this idea?]
** Allow displaying an X window from an external program in a buffer,
e.g. to render graphics from Java applets. [gerd and/or wmperry
artist, ansi-color, array, battery, calculator, cdl, cmuscheme,
completion, cua, delim-col, dirtrack, double, echistory, elide-head,
easymenu, expand, flow-ctrl, format [format-alist],
- generic/generic-x [various modes], kermit, log-edit, ledit
- [obsolete?], makesum, midnight [other than in Kill Buffer node],
+ generic/generic-x [various modes], kermit, log-edit,
+ makesum, midnight [other than in Kill Buffer node],
mouse-copy [?], mouse-drag, mouse-sel, net-utils, rcompile,
snmp-mode [?], soundex [should be interactive?], strokes [start from
the web page], talk, thingatpt [interactive functions?], type-break,
- vcursor, xscheme, zone-mode [?], mlconvert [?], iso-cvt, iso-swed,
- swedish, feedmail [?], uce, bruce, gametree, meese, page-ext,
+ vcursor, xscheme, zone-mode [?], mlconvert [?], iso-cvt,
+ feedmail [?], uce, gametree, meese, page-ext,
refbib, refer, scribe, sgml-mode, spell, texinfo, underline,
- cmacexp, hideif, mantemp [obsolete?], pcomplete, assoc, xml,
+ cmacexp, hideif, mantemp [obsolete?], pcomplete, xml,
cvs-status (should be described in PCL-CVS manual); other progmodes,
probably in separate manual.
*** Bugs
+**** The event loop does not redraw.
+ A problem is that redraw don't happen during resize,
+ because we can't break out from the NSapp loop during resize.
+ There was a special trick to detect mouse press in the lower right
+ corner and track mouse movements, but this did not work well, and was
+ not scalable to the new Lion "resize on every window edge" behavior.
+ [As of trunk r109635, 2012-08-15, the event loop no longer polls.]
+
**** (mouse-avoidance-mode 'banish) then minimize Emacs, will pop window back
up on top of all others
** Bidirectional editing
+*** Support reordering structured text
+Two important use cases: (1) comments and strings in program sources,
+and (2) text with markup, like HTML or XML.
+
+One idea is to invent a special text property that would instruct the
+display engine to reorder only the parts of buffer text covered by
+that property. The display engine will then push its state onto the
+iterator stack, restrict the bidi iterator to accessing only the
+portion of buffer text covered by the property, reorder the text, then
+pop its state from stack and continue as usual. This will require
+minor changes in the bidi_it structure.
+
+This design requires Lisp-level code to put the text properties on the
+relevant parts of the buffer text. That could be done using JIT
+fontifications, or as a preliminary processing when the file is
+visited. With HTML/XML, the code that puts text properties needs to
+pay attention to the bidi directives embedded in the HTML/XML stream.
+
*** Allow the user to control the direction of the UI
**** Introduce user option to control direction of mode line.
-This requires to figure out what to do with unibyte strings that are
-used in constructing the mode line. Currently, unibyte strings are
-not reordered by bidi.c, without which R2L mode line will not display
-correctly. One possibility would be to STRING_SET_MULTIBYTE all Lisp
-strings involved in the mode line, and then pass them through bidi.c.
-
-Another problem is the header line, which is produced by the same
-routines as the mode line. While it makes sense to have the mode-line
+One problem is the header line, which is produced by the same routines
+as the mode line. While it makes sense to have the mode-line
direction controlled by a single global variable, header lines are
buffer-specific, so they need a separate treatment in this regard.
*** Decide what to do with some uncommitted imagemagick support
functions for image size etc.
-*** Test with more systems.
-Tested on Fedora 12, 14, and the libmagick that ships with it.
-I also tried using an ImageMagick compiled from their SVN, in
-parallel with the one packaged by Fedora, it worked well.
-Ubuntu 8.04 was tested, but it seems it ships a broken ImageMagick.
-
** nxml mode
*** High priority
this.]
** Rewrite make-docfile to be clean and maintainable.
+ It might be better to replace it with Lisp, using the byte compiler.
+ http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2012-06/msg00037.html
** Add an inferior-comint-minor-mode to capture the common set of operations
offered by major modes that offer an associated inferior
For use by sml-mode, python-mode, tex-mode, scheme-mode, lisp-mode,
haskell-mode, tuareg-mode, ...
-** Make SYNC_INPUT the default. [true since 2008-03-11]
- All loops using immediate_quit need to be checked to ensure that
- C-g can interrupt them, in case of an infinite loop. Once we
- switch to using SYNC_INPUT, we can remove the BLOCK_INPUTs in the
- allocation functions (allocate_string etc.) without worrying about
- data munging.
-
** Add "link" button class
Add a standard button-class named "link", and make all other link-like
button classes inherit from it. Set the default face of the "link" button
class to the standard "link" face.
+* Wishlist items:
+
+** Maybe replace etags.c with a Lisp implementation.
+http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2012-06/msg00354.html
+
+** Maybe replace lib-src/rcs2log with a Lisp implementation.
+It wouldn't have to be a complete replacement, just enough
+for vc-rcs-update-changelog.
+
* Other known bugs:
** `make-frame' forgets unhandled parameters, at least for X11 frames.