Emacs TODO List -*-outline-*- Copyright (C) 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007 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. * Small but important fixes needed in existing features: ** Fix compilation when Xaw3d libraries are present but libxaw is not. In new X11 versions, xaw3dg-dev does not depend on libxaw-dev, so the latter need not be installed. As a result, all the source files that look for include files in X11/Xaw should look in X11/Xaw3d if we are using Xaw3d. ** Compute the list of active keymaps *after* reading the first event. ** Avoid using "iff" in doc strings. ** mouse-autoselect-window should wait to select the window until the mouse is put to rest or after a delay or both, so that moving over a window doesn't select it. ** In C-x d, the default if you type RET should be the directory name, but if you type M-n you should get the visited file name of the current buffer. ** describe-face should show an example of text in the face. ** Distribute a bar cursor of width > 1 evenly between the two glyphs on each side of the bar (what to do at the edges?). ** Make vc-checkin avoid reverting the buffer if has not changed after the checkin. Comparing (md5 BUFFER) to (md5 FILE) should be enough. ** buffer-offer-save should be a permanent local. ** revert-buffer should eliminate overlays and the mark. ** erase-buffer should perhaps disregard read-only properties of text. ** Make occur correctly handle matches that span more than one line, as well as overlapping matches. ** Fix the kill/yank treatment of invisible text. At the moment, invisible text is placed in the kill-ring, so that the contents of the ring may not correspond to the text as displayed to the user. It ought to be possible to omit text which is invisible (due to a text-property, overlay, or selective display) from the kill-ring. ** Change the way define-minor-mode handles autoloading. It should not generate :require. Or :require in defcustom should not be recorded in the user's custom-set-variables call. ** Feature to change cursor shape when Emacs is idle (for more than a specified time). ** The buttons at the top of a custom buffer should not omit variables whose values are currently hidden. ** Clean up the variables in browse-url. Perhaps use a shell command string to specify the browser instead of the mushrooming set of functions. See also ESR's proposal for a BROWSER environment variable . ** Enhance scroll-bar to handle tall line (similar to line-move). ** Make occur handle multi-line matches cleanly with context. ** In Custom buffers, put the option that turns a mode on or off first, using a heuristic of some kind? ** Define recompute-arg and recompute-arg-if for fix_command to use. See rms message of 11 Dec 05. ** Height returned by frame-parameter ... and height given to make-frame does not mean the same thing. The former includes menu and tool bar lines, the latter don't. frame-parameter should return height without menu and tool bar lines. ** In Emacs Info, examples of using Customize should be clickable and they should create Custom buffers. ** The toolbar should show keyboard equivalents in its tooltips. ** Add function to redraw the tool bar. ** M-! M-n should fetch the buffer-file-name as the default. ** Redesign the load-history data structure so it can cope better with evaluating definitions of the same function from different files, recording which file the latest definition came from. ** make back_comment use syntax-ppss or equivalent. ** Improve configure's treatment of NON_GNU_CPP on Solaris. (patch available for after Emacs 22) ** Consider improving src/sysdep.c's search for a fqdn. http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2007-04/msg00782.html ** Find a proper fix for rcirc multiline nick adding. http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2007-04/msg00684.html * Important features: ** Provide user-friendly ways to list all available font families, list fonts, display a font as a sample, etc. [fx is looking at multilingual font selection for the Unicode branch of Emacs.] ** Provide a convenient way to select a color with the mouse. ** Rewrite the face code to be simpler, clearer and faster. ** Program Enriched mode to read and save in RTF. [Is there actually a decent single definition of RTF? Maybe see info at http://latex2rtf.sourceforge.net/.] This task seems to be addressed by http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/emacs-rtf/, which is still in very early stages. ** Implement something better than the current Refill mode. This probably needs some primitive support. ** Add a command to make a "Local Variables" section in the current buffer and/or add a variable to the list. ** Implement primitive and higher-level functions to allow filling properly with variable-pitch faces. ** Implement a smoother vertical scroll facility, one that allows C-v to scroll through a tall image. The primitive operations posn-at-point and posn-at-x-y should now make it doable in elisp. ** Implement intelligent search/replace, going beyond query-replace (see http://graphics.csail.mit.edu/~rcm/chi04.pdf). ** Implement other text formatting properties. *** Footnotes that can appear either in place or at the end of the page. *** text property that says "don't break line in middle of this". Don't break the line between two characters that have the same value of this property. *** Discretionary hyphens that are not visible when they are at end of line. ** Internationalize Emacs's messages. ** Set up a facility to save backtraces when errors happen during specified filters, specified timers, and specified hooks. ** Install mmc@maruska.dyndns.org's no-flicker change. ** Add a "current vertical pixel level" value that goes with point, so that motion commands can also move through tall images. This value would be to point as window-vscroll is to window-start. ** Address internationalization of symbols names essentially as documentation, e.g. in command names and Custom. ** Make the Lucid menu widget display multilingual text. [This probably needs to be done from actual Emacs buffers, either directly in the menu or by rendering in an unmapped window and copying the pixels. The current code assumes a specific locale; that isn't good enough even if X can render the arbitrary text] [The gtk port now displays multilingual text in menus, but only insofar as Emacs can encode it as utf-8 and gtk can display the result.] Maybe making Lucid menus work like Gtk's (i.e. just force utf-8) is good enough now that Emacs can encode most chars into utf-8. ** Remove the limitation that window and frame widths and heights can be only full columns/lines. * Other features we would like: ** 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' for some or all errors associated with using subprocesses. ** Maybe reinterpret `parse-error' as a category of errors and put some other errors under it. ** A function to tell you the argument pattern of functions. See `function-arity' in http://www.loveshack.ukfsn.org/emacs/fx-misc.el. ** Make byte-compile warn when a doc string is too wide. ** Make byte-optimization warnings issue accurate line numbers. ** A function to check for customizable options that have been set but not saved, and ask the user whether to save them. This could go in kill-emacs-query-functions, to remind people to save their changes. If the user says yes, show them in a Custom buffer using customize-customized. ** Record the sxhash of the default value for customized variables and notify the user (maybe by adding a menu item or toolbar button, as the detection can occur during autoload time) when the default changes (meaning that new versions of the Lisp source with a changed default value got installed) and offer ediff on the respective customization buffers. ** Emacs Lisp mode could put an overlay on the defun for every function that has advice. The overlay could have `after-text' like " [Function has advice]". It might look like (defun foo [Function has advice] (x y) The overlay could also be a button that you could use to view the advice. ** Add a function to get the insertion-type of the markers in an overlay. ** ange-ftp *** understand sftp This is hard to make work because sftp doesn't print status messages. *** Use MLS for ange-ftp-insert-directory if a list of files is specified. ** Ability to map a key, including all modified-combinations. E.g map mouse-4 to wheel-up as well as M-mouse-4 -> M-wheel-up M-C-mouse-4 -> M-C-wheel-up, H-S-C-M-s-double-mouse-4 -> H-S-C-M-s-double-wheel-up, ... ** Beefed-up syntax-tables. *** recognize multi-character syntactic entities like `begin' and `end'. *** nested string-delimiters (for Postscript's (foo(bar)baz) strings). *** support for infix operators (with precedence). *** support for the $ (paired delimiter) in parse-partial-sexp. *** support for hook-chars whose effect on the parsing-state is specified by elisp code. Thus a char could both close a string and open a comment at the same time and do it in a context-sensitive way. *** ability to add mode-specific data to the partial-parse-state. ** Add a way to convert a keyboard macro to equivalent Lisp code. ** Have a command suggestion help system that recognizes patterns of commands which could be replaced with a simpler common command. It should not make more than one suggestion per 10 minutes. ** Add a way to define input methods by computing them (when first used) from other input methods. Then redefine C-x 8 to use a user-selected input method, with the default being the union of latin-1-prefix and latin-1-postfix. ** Switch the Windows port to using Unicode keyboard input (maybe). Based on http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms633586.aspx, this boils down to (1) calling RegisterClassW function to register Emacs windows, and (2) modifying ALL system messages to use Unicode. In particular, WM_CHAR messages, which result from keyboard input, will then come in encoded in UTF-16. One advantage of switching to Unicode is to toss encoded-kbd usage, which will solve the problem with binding non-ASCII keys with modifiers. Problem: using this on Windows 9x/ME requires installing the Microsoft Layer for Unicode (MSLU), which might not implement all the required functionality that is available built-in on Windows XP and later. We should not make this change if it would pressure users of unauthorized copies of older versions of Windows to downgrade to versions that require activation. ** Implement a clean way to use different major modes for different parts of a buffer. This could be useful in editing Bison input files, for instance, or other kinds of text where one language is embedded in another language. See http://www.loveshack.ukfsn.org/emacs/multi-mode.el and also mmm-mode, as reference for approaches took by others. ** Arrange a way for an input method to return the first character immediately, then replace it later. So that C-s a with input method latin-1-postfix would immediately search for an a. ** Give start-process the ability to direct standard-error output to a different filter. ** Make desktop.el save the "frame configuration" of Emacs (in some useful sense). ** Give desktop.el a feature to switch between different named desktops. ** Replace finder.el with something that generates an Info file which gives the same information through a menu structure. [Dave Love started on this.] ** Add a cpio mode, more or less like tar mode. ** Implement a variant of uncompress.el or jka-compr.el that works with GNU Privacy Guard for encryption. [Code exists but isn't assigned. See the Gnus development sources for assigned code concerning GPG use with mail, which is probably a good start.] See also http://www.loveshack.ukfsn.org/emacs/auto-crypt.tgz. ** Save undo information in special temporary files, and reload it when needed for undoing. This could extend undo capacity. ** Change the Windows NT menu code so that it handles the deep_p argument and avoids regenerating the whole menu bar menu tree except when the user tries to use the menubar. This requires the RIT to forward the WM_INITMENU message to the main thread, and not return from that message until the main thread has processed the MENU_BAR_ACTIVATE_EVENT and regenerated the whole menu bar. In the mean time, it should process other messages. ** Get some major packages installed: W3 (development version needs significant work), PSGML. Check the assignments file for other packages which might go in and have been missed. ** 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 ? what else ? ** Provide real menus on ttys. The MS-DOS implementation can serve as 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. ** 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 compiled and don't warn about functions defined in them. ** Highlight rectangles (`mouse-track-rectangle-p' in XEmacs). Already in CUA, but it's a valuable feature worth making more general. ** Support simultaneous tty and X frames. [See the multi-tty branch of Emacs at http://lorentey.hu/project/emacs.] ** 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. ** Update the FAQ. ** Allow auto-compression-mode to use zlib calls if zlib is available. [It's required for PNG, so may be linked anyhow.] ** Add a --pristine startup flag which does -q --no-site-file plus ignoring X resources (Doze equivalents?) and most of the environment. What should not be ignored needs consideration. ** Improve the GC (generational, incremental). (We may be able to use the Boehm collector.) [See the Boehm-GC branch in CVS for work on this.] ** Check what hooks would help Emacspeak -- see the defadvising in W3. ** Add definitions for symbol properties, for documentation purposes. ** Add horizontal scroll bars. ** Provide an optional feature which computes a scroll bar slider's size and its position from lines instead of characters. ** Add support for SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) rendering to Emacs. ** Allow unknown image types to be rendered via an external program converting them to, say, PBM (in the same way as PostScript?). ** Display images with alpha channels, such as png, with the current background color of whatever frame it is displayed in. Currently, we use the default background color if specified in the png file, or, if that is unspecified, the background color of the frame in which the image was first created. Ideally, the image should display the background color of whichever frame it is being displayed in. The main complication is that this will require the loading of a new image object for each different background color. ** Allow displaying an X window from an external program in a buffer, e.g. to render graphics from Java applets. [gerd and/or wmperry thought this was feasible.] ** Allow images (not just text) in the margin to be mouse-sensitive. (Requires recursing through display properties). Provide some way to simulate mouse-clicks on marginal text without a mouse. ** Implement Lisp functions to determine properly whether a character is displayable (particularly needed in XFree 4, sigh). Use it to define useful glyphs that may be displayed as images or unicodes (with ASCIIfied fallback via latin1-disp). Examples include box-drawing graphics in Custom buffers, W3 rules and tables, and tree displays generally, mode-line mail indicator. [See work done already for Emacs 22 and consult fx.] ** Do something to make rms happy with fx's dynamic loading, and use it to implement things like auto-loaded buffer parsers and database access in cases which need more than Lisp. ** Extend ps-print to deal with multiple font sizes, images, and extra encodings. ** Provide portable undumping using mmap (per gerd design). ** Make byte-compile avoid binding an expanded defsubst's args when the body only calls primitives. ** Use the XIE X extension, if available, for image display. ** Make monochrome images display using the foreground and background colors of the applicable faces. ** Face remapping. ** Make `format-time-string' preserve text properties like `format'. ** Optionally make the cursor a little thinner at the end of a line or the end of the buffer. ** Add support for rendering antialiased text, probably using XRender/Freetype. ** Port the conservative stack marking code of Emacs' garbage collector to more systems, so that we can completely get rid of GCPROs. Note that Boehm garbage collector provides this. ** Reorder defcustom's in each package so that the more important options come first in the Customize buffers. This could be done by either rearranging the file (since options are shown in the order they appear in the *.el files), or by adding a few :set-after attributes. ** Maybe document the features of libraries missing from the manual (or ancillary manuals, including the Lisp manual in some cases). This is not worth doing for all of these packages and we need not aim for completeness, but some may be worth documenting. Here's a list which is probably not complete/correct: align, allout, 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], 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, refbib, refer, scribe, sgml-mode, spell, texinfo, underline, cmacexp, hideif, mantemp [obsolete?], pcomplete, assoc, xml, cvs-status (should be described in PCL-CVS manual); other progmodes, probably in separate manual. ** Convert the XPM bitmaps to PPM, replace the PBMs with them and scrap the XPMs so that the colour versions work generally. (Requires care with the colour used for the transparent regions.) ** Convenient access to the `values' variable. It would be nice to have an interface that would show you the printed reps of the elements of the list in a menu, let you select one of the values, and put it into some other variable, without changing the value of `values'. ** (Controlled by a flag) make open and close syntax match exactly, i.e. `(' doesn't match `]'. ** Specify parameter ID-FORMAT in all calls to `file-attributes' and `directory-files-and-attributes' where attributes UID or GID are used. Whenever possible, use value 'string. When done, change meaning of default value from 'integer to 'string. If value 'integer is used nowhere, remove the parameter ID-FORMAT from the definition of `file-attributes' and `directory-files-and-attributes' and from the calls. ** Modify the emulation of `stat' for MS-Windows to support large files. The current version uses the stock Windows definition of `struct stat', where the file's size is returned as a 32-bit integer. That overflows for files larger than 4GB. To fix, modify `stat' to use 64-bit size, and use a declaration of `struct stat' that supports such sizes. ** Make language-info-alist customizable. Currently a user can customize only the variable `current-language-environment'. ** Improve language environment handling so that Emacs can fit better to a users locale. Currently Emacs uses utf-8 language environment for all utf-8 locales, thus a user in ja_JP.UTF-8 locale are also put in utf-8 lang. env. In such a case, it is better to use Japanese lang. env. but prefer utf-8 coding system. ** Enhance locale handling: handle language, territory and charset orthogonally and de-emphasize language environments. Use the locale to set up more things, such as fontsets, the default Ispell dictionary, diary format, calendar holidays and display, quoting characters and phrase boundaries, sentence endings, collation for sorting (at least for unicodes), HTTP Accept-language, patterns for directory listings and compilation messages, yes-or-no replies, common menu items when the toolkit supports it ... `locale-info' needs extending for LC_COLLATE &c. [fx started on this.] ** Eliminate the current restriction on header printing by ps-print. Currently, a header can contain only single 1-byte charset in addition to ASCII. ** In ps-print, provide an user friendly interface to specify fonts. ** OpenType font support for various complex scripts (e.g. Devanagari). As X protocal doesn't provide a way to access OpenType Layout Tables in a OpenType font of a server side, we need a way to utilize local fonts (perhaps by directly using the Freetype library or indirectly via Xft library). ** Enhance word boundary detection for such a script that doesn't use space at word boundary (e.g. Thai). ** Implement interface programs with major Japanese conversion server in lib-src so that they can be used from the input method "japanese". Currently, most Japanese users are using external packages (e.g. tamago, anthy) or an input method via XIM. ** Let LEIM handle the Mode_switch key like XIM does (i.e. a toggle like C-\ but which can also be used as a modifier). ** Improve Help buffers: Change the face of previously visited links (like Info, but also with regard to namespace), add a forward button to make the Help buffer more browser like and gives the value of lisp expressions e.g auto-mode-alist, the right face. [nickrob@snap.net.nz has a patch for this for inclusion after 22.1]. ** Possibly make `list-holidays' eval items in the calendar-holidays variable. See thread . [rgm@gnu.org will look at this after 22.1] ** Possibly make cal-dst use the system timezone database directly. See thread * Internal changes ** Cleanup all the GC_ mark bit stuff -- there is no longer any distinction since the mark bit is no longer stored in the Lisp_Object itself. ** Merge ibuffer.el and buff-menu.el. More specifically do what's needed to make ibuffer.el the default, or just an extension of buff-menu.el. ** Use pcomplete by default in shell-mode. This means to make it behave (by default) more like the current code. Use it also for read-shell-command, M-x compile, ... ** Merge sendmail.el and messages.el. Probably not a complete merge, but at least arrange for messages.el to be a derived mode of sendmail.el. Or arrange for messages.el to be split into a small core and "the rest" so that we use less resources as long as we stick to the features provided in sendmail.el. ** Replace gmalloc.c with the modified Doug Lea code from the current GNU libc so that the special mmapping of buffers can be removed -- that apparently loses under Solaris, at least. [fx has mostly done this.] ** Rewrite make-docfile to be clean and maintainable. ** Add an inferior-comint-minor-mode to capture the common set of operations offered by major modes that offer an associated inferior comint-derived mode. I.e. basically make cmuscheme.el/inf-lisp.el generic. For use by sml-mode, python-mode, tex-mode, scheme-mode, lisp-mode, haskell-mode, tuareg-mode, ... ** Make SYNC_INPUT the default. 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. * Other known bugs: ** a two-char comment-starter whose two chars are symbol constituents will not be noticed if it appears within a word. ** Fix unexelf.c to handle the .data.rel and .data.rel.local sections made by GCC 3.4 on IRIX. This file is part of GNU Emacs. GNU Emacs is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2, or (at your option) any later version. GNU Emacs is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details. You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with GNU Emacs; see the file COPYING. If not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301, USA. ;;; arch-tag: b0a3e40b-726a-457d-9999-ba848321b036