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 ** Fix compilation when Xaw3d libraries are present but libxaw is not.
18 In new X11 versions, xaw3dg-dev does not depend on libxaw-dev, so the
19 latter need not be installed. As a result, all the source files that
20 look for include files in X11/Xaw should look in X11/Xaw3d if we are
23 ** Compute the list of active keymaps *after* reading the first event.
25 ** Avoid using "iff" in doc strings.
27 ** mouse-autoselect-window should wait to select the window until
28 the mouse is put to rest or after a delay or both, so that moving over
29 a window doesn't select it.
31 ** In C-x d, the default if you type RET should be the directory name,
32 but if you type M-n you should get the visited file name of the
35 ** describe-face should show an example of text in the face.
37 ** Distribute a bar cursor of width > 1 evenly between the two glyphs
38 on each side of the bar (what to do at the edges?).
40 ** Make vc-checkin avoid reverting the buffer if has not changed after
41 the checkin. Comparing (md5 BUFFER) to (md5 FILE) should be enough.
43 ** buffer-offer-save should be a permanent local.
45 ** revert-buffer should eliminate overlays and the mark.
47 ** erase-buffer should perhaps disregard read-only properties of text.
49 ** Make occur correctly handle matches that span more than one line,
50 as well as overlapping matches.
52 ** Fix the kill/yank treatment of invisible text. At the moment,
53 invisible text is placed in the kill-ring, so that the contents of
54 the ring may not correspond to the text as displayed to the user.
55 It ought to be possible to omit text which is invisible (due to a
56 text-property, overlay, or selective display) from the kill-ring.
58 ** Change the way define-minor-mode handles autoloading.
59 It should not generate :require. Or :require in defcustom
60 should not be recorded in the user's custom-set-variables call.
62 ** Feature to change cursor shape when Emacs is idle (for more than
65 ** The buttons at the top of a custom buffer should not omit
66 variables whose values are currently hidden.
68 ** Clean up the variables in browse-url. Perhaps use a shell command string to
69 specify the browser instead of the mushrooming set of functions.
70 See also ESR's proposal for a BROWSER environment variable
71 <URL:http://www.catb.org/~esr/BROWSER/browse-url.patch>.
73 ** Enhance scroll-bar to handle tall line (similar to line-move).
75 ** Make occur handle multi-line matches cleanly with context.
77 ** In Custom buffers, put the option that turns a mode on or off first,
78 using a heuristic of some kind?
80 ** Define recompute-arg and recompute-arg-if for fix_command to use.
81 See rms message of 11 Dec 05.
83 ** Height returned by frame-parameter ... and height given to
84 make-frame does not mean the same thing. The former includes menu and
85 tool bar lines, the latter don't. frame-parameter should return height
86 without menu and tool bar lines.
88 ** In Emacs Info, examples of using Customize should be clickable
89 and they should create Custom buffers.
91 ** The toolbar should show keyboard equivalents in its tooltips.
93 ** Add function to redraw the tool bar.
95 ** M-! M-n should fetch the buffer-file-name as the default.
97 ** Redesign the load-history data structure so it can cope better
98 with evaluating definitions of the same function from different files,
99 recording which file the latest definition came from.
101 ** make back_comment use syntax-ppss or equivalent.
103 ** Improve configure's treatment of NON_GNU_CPP on Solaris.
104 (patch available for after Emacs 22)
106 ** Consider improving src/sysdep.c's search for a fqdn.
107 http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2007-04/msg00782.html
109 ** Find a proper fix for rcirc multiline nick adding.
110 http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2007-04/msg00684.html
112 * Important features:
114 ** Provide user-friendly ways to list all available font families,
115 list fonts, display a font as a sample, etc. [fx is looking at
116 multilingual font selection for the Unicode branch of Emacs.]
118 ** Provide a convenient way to select a color with the mouse.
120 ** Rewrite the face code to be simpler, clearer and faster.
122 ** Program Enriched mode to read and save in RTF. [Is there actually a
123 decent single definition of RTF? Maybe see info at
124 http://latex2rtf.sourceforge.net/.] This task seems to be addressed
125 by http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/emacs-rtf/, which is still in
128 ** Implement something better than the current Refill mode. This
129 probably needs some primitive support.
131 ** Add a command to make a "Local Variables" section in the current buffer
132 and/or add a variable to the list.
134 ** Implement primitive and higher-level functions to allow filling
135 properly with variable-pitch faces.
137 ** Implement a smoother vertical scroll facility, one that allows
138 C-v to scroll through a tall image. The primitive operations
139 posn-at-point and posn-at-x-y should now make it doable in elisp.
141 ** Implement intelligent search/replace, going beyond query-replace
142 (see http://graphics.csail.mit.edu/~rcm/chi04.pdf).
144 ** Implement other text formatting properties.
145 *** Footnotes that can appear either in place or at the end of the page.
146 *** text property that says "don't break line in middle of this".
147 Don't break the line between two characters that have the
148 same value of this property.
149 *** Discretionary hyphens that are not visible when they are at end of line.
151 ** Internationalize Emacs's messages.
153 ** Set up a facility to save backtraces when errors happen during
154 specified filters, specified timers, and specified hooks.
156 ** Install mmc@maruska.dyndns.org's no-flicker change.
158 ** Add a "current vertical pixel level" value that goes with point,
159 so that motion commands can also move through tall images.
160 This value would be to point as window-vscroll is to window-start.
162 ** Address internationalization of symbols names essentially
163 as documentation, e.g. in command names and Custom.
165 ** Make the Lucid menu widget display multilingual text. [This
166 probably needs to be done from actual Emacs buffers, either directly
167 in the menu or by rendering in an unmapped window and copying the
168 pixels. The current code assumes a specific locale; that isn't good
169 enough even if X can render the arbitrary text] [The gtk
170 port now displays multilingual text in menus, but only insofar as
171 Emacs can encode it as utf-8 and gtk can display the result.]
172 Maybe making Lucid menus work like Gtk's (i.e. just force utf-8) is good
173 enough now that Emacs can encode most chars into utf-8.
175 ** Remove the limitation that window and frame widths and heights can
176 be only full columns/lines.
178 * Other features we would like:
180 ** Remove the default toggling behavior of minor modes when called from elisp
181 rather than interactively. This a trivial one-liner in easy-mode.el.
182 ** Create a category of errors called `user-error' for errors which are
183 typically due to pilot errors and should thus be in debug-ignored-errors.
185 ** Give Tar mode all the features of Archive mode.
187 ** Create a category of errors called `process-error'
188 for some or all errors associated with using subprocesses.
190 ** Maybe reinterpret `parse-error' as a category of errors
191 and put some other errors under it.
193 ** A function to tell you the argument pattern of functions.
194 See `function-arity' in http://www.loveshack.ukfsn.org/emacs/fx-misc.el.
196 ** Make byte-compile warn when a doc string is too wide.
198 ** Make byte-optimization warnings issue accurate line numbers.
200 ** A function to check for customizable options that have been
201 set but not saved, and ask the user whether to save them.
202 This could go in kill-emacs-query-functions, to remind people
203 to save their changes. If the user says yes, show them
204 in a Custom buffer using customize-customized.
206 ** Record the sxhash of the default value for customized variables
207 and notify the user (maybe by adding a menu item or toolbar button,
208 as the detection can occur during autoload time) when the default
209 changes (meaning that new versions of the Lisp source with a changed
210 default value got installed) and offer ediff on the respective
211 customization buffers.
213 ** Emacs Lisp mode could put an overlay on the defun for every
214 function that has advice. The overlay could have `after-text' like
215 " [Function has advice]". It might look like (defun foo [Function
216 has advice] (x y) The overlay could also be a button that you could
217 use to view the advice.
219 ** Add a function to get the insertion-type of the markers in an overlay.
223 This is hard to make work because sftp doesn't print status
226 *** Use MLS for ange-ftp-insert-directory if a list of files is specified.
228 ** Ability to map a key, including all modified-combinations.
229 E.g map mouse-4 to wheel-up as well as M-mouse-4 -> M-wheel-up
230 M-C-mouse-4 -> M-C-wheel-up, H-S-C-M-s-double-mouse-4 ->
231 H-S-C-M-s-double-wheel-up, ...
233 ** Beefed-up syntax-tables.
234 *** recognize multi-character syntactic entities like `begin' and `end'.
235 *** nested string-delimiters (for Postscript's (foo(bar)baz) strings).
236 *** support for infix operators (with precedence).
237 *** support for the $ (paired delimiter) in parse-partial-sexp.
238 *** support for hook-chars whose effect on the parsing-state is specified
239 by elisp code. Thus a char could both close a string and open a comment
240 at the same time and do it in a context-sensitive way.
241 *** ability to add mode-specific data to the partial-parse-state.
243 ** Add a way to convert a keyboard macro to equivalent Lisp code.
245 ** Have a command suggestion help system that recognizes patterns
246 of commands which could be replaced with a simpler common command.
247 It should not make more than one suggestion per 10 minutes.
249 ** Add a way to define input methods by computing them (when first used)
250 from other input methods. Then redefine C-x 8 to use a
251 user-selected input method, with the default being the union of
252 latin-1-prefix and latin-1-postfix.
254 ** Switch the Windows port to using Unicode keyboard input (maybe).
255 Based on http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms633586.aspx,
256 this boils down to (1) calling RegisterClassW function to register
257 Emacs windows, and (2) modifying ALL system messages to use Unicode.
258 In particular, WM_CHAR messages, which result from keyboard input,
259 will then come in encoded in UTF-16.
261 One advantage of switching to Unicode is to toss encoded-kbd usage,
262 which will solve the problem with binding non-ASCII keys with
265 Problem: using this on Windows 9x/ME requires installing the
266 Microsoft Layer for Unicode (MSLU), which might not implement all
267 the required functionality that is available built-in on Windows XP
268 and later. We should not make this change if it would pressure
269 users of unauthorized copies of older versions of Windows to
270 downgrade to versions that require activation.
272 ** Implement a clean way to use different major modes for
273 different parts of a buffer. This could be useful in editing
274 Bison input files, for instance, or other kinds of text
275 where one language is embedded in another language. See
276 http://www.loveshack.ukfsn.org/emacs/multi-mode.el and also
277 mmm-mode, as reference for approaches took by others.
279 ** Arrange a way for an input method to return the first character
280 immediately, then replace it later. So that C-s a with
281 input method latin-1-postfix would immediately search for an a.
283 ** Give start-process the ability to direct standard-error
284 output to a different filter.
286 ** Make desktop.el save the "frame configuration" of Emacs (in some
289 ** Give desktop.el a feature to switch between different named
292 ** Replace finder.el with something that generates an Info file
293 which gives the same information through a menu structure. [Dave
294 Love started on this.]
296 ** Add a cpio mode, more or less like tar mode.
298 ** Implement a variant of uncompress.el or jka-compr.el that works with
299 GNU Privacy Guard for encryption. [Code exists but isn't assigned.
300 See the Gnus development sources for assigned code concerning GPG
301 use with mail, which is probably a good start.] See also
302 http://www.loveshack.ukfsn.org/emacs/auto-crypt.tgz.
304 ** Save undo information in special temporary files, and reload it
305 when needed for undoing. This could extend undo capacity.
307 ** Change the Windows NT menu code
308 so that it handles the deep_p argument and avoids
309 regenerating the whole menu bar menu tree except
310 when the user tries to use the menubar.
312 This requires the RIT to forward the WM_INITMENU message to
313 the main thread, and not return from that message until the main
314 thread has processed the MENU_BAR_ACTIVATE_EVENT and regenerated
315 the whole menu bar. In the mean time, it should process other messages.
317 ** Get some major packages installed: W3 (development version needs
318 significant work), PSGML. Check the assignments file for other
319 packages which might go in and have been missed.
321 ** Make keymaps a first-class Lisp object (this means a rewrite of
322 keymap.c). What should it do apart from being opaque ?
323 multiple inheritance ? faster where-is ? no more fix_submap_inheritance ?
326 ** Provide real menus on ttys. The MS-DOS implementation can serve as
327 an example how to do part of this; see the XMenu* functions on msdos.c.
329 ** Implement popular parts of the rest of the CL functions as compiler
332 ** Make compiler warnings about functions that might be undefined at run time
333 smarter, so that they know which files are required by the file being
334 compiled and don't warn about functions defined in them.
336 ** Highlight rectangles (`mouse-track-rectangle-p' in XEmacs). Already in CUA,
337 but it's a valuable feature worth making more general.
339 ** Support simultaneous tty and X frames. [See the multi-tty branch of Emacs
340 at http://lorentey.hu/project/emacs.]
342 ** Provide MIME support for Rmail using the Gnus MIME library. [Maybe
343 not now feasible, given Gnus maintenance decisions. fx looked at
344 this and can say where some of the problems are.]
346 ** Eliminate the storm of warnings concerning char/unsigned char
347 mismatches that we get with GCC 4.x and proprietary compilers on
348 various systems. They make it difficult to spot the important
351 ** Fix anything necessary to use `long long' EMACS_INTs with GCC.
353 ** Split out parts of lisp.h and generate Makefile dependencies
358 ** Allow auto-compression-mode to use zlib calls if zlib is available.
359 [It's required for PNG, so may be linked anyhow.]
361 ** Add a --pristine startup flag which does -q --no-site-file plus
362 ignoring X resources (Doze equivalents?) and most of the
363 environment. What should not be ignored needs consideration.
365 ** Improve the GC (generational, incremental). (We may be able to use
366 the Boehm collector.) [See the Boehm-GC branch in CVS for work on
369 ** Check what hooks would help Emacspeak -- see the defadvising in W3.
371 ** Add definitions for symbol properties, for documentation purposes.
373 ** Add horizontal scroll bars.
375 ** Provide an optional feature which computes a scroll bar slider's
376 size and its position from lines instead of characters.
378 ** Add support for SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) rendering to
381 ** Allow unknown image types to be rendered via an external program
382 converting them to, say, PBM (in the same way as PostScript?).
384 ** Display images with alpha channels, such as png, with the current
385 background color of whatever frame it is displayed in. Currently, we
386 use the default background color if specified in the png file, or, if
387 that is unspecified, the background color of the frame in which the
388 image was first created. Ideally, the image should display the
389 background color of whichever frame it is being displayed in. The
390 main complication is that this will require the loading of a new image
391 object for each different background color.
393 ** Allow displaying an X window from an external program in a buffer,
394 e.g. to render graphics from Java applets. [gerd and/or wmperry
395 thought this was feasible.]
397 ** Allow images (not just text) in the margin to be mouse-sensitive.
398 (Requires recursing through display properties). Provide some way
399 to simulate mouse-clicks on marginal text without a mouse.
401 ** Implement Lisp functions to determine properly whether a character
402 is displayable (particularly needed in XFree 4, sigh). Use it to
403 define useful glyphs that may be displayed as images or unicodes
404 (with ASCIIfied fallback via latin1-disp). Examples include
405 box-drawing graphics in Custom buffers, W3 rules and tables, and
406 tree displays generally, mode-line mail indicator. [See work done
407 already for Emacs 22 and consult fx.]
409 ** Do something to make rms happy with fx's dynamic loading, and use it
410 to implement things like auto-loaded buffer parsers and database
411 access in cases which need more than Lisp.
413 ** Extend ps-print to deal with multiple font sizes, images, and extra
416 ** Provide portable undumping using mmap (per gerd design).
418 ** Make byte-compile avoid binding an expanded defsubst's args
419 when the body only calls primitives.
421 ** Use the XIE X extension, if available, for image display.
423 ** Make monochrome images display using the foreground and background
424 colors of the applicable faces.
428 ** Make `format-time-string' preserve text properties like `format'.
430 ** Optionally make the cursor a little thinner at the end of a line
431 or the end of the buffer.
433 ** Add support for rendering antialiased text, probably using
436 ** Port the conservative stack marking code of Emacs' garbage collector
437 to more systems, so that we can completely get rid of GCPROs. Note
438 that Boehm garbage collector provides this.
440 ** Reorder defcustom's in each package so that the more important
441 options come first in the Customize buffers. This could be done by
442 either rearranging the file (since options are shown in the order
443 they appear in the *.el files), or by adding a few :set-after
446 ** Maybe document the features of libraries missing from the manual (or
447 ancillary manuals, including the Lisp manual in some cases).
448 This is not worth doing for all of these packages and we need not
449 aim for completeness, but some may be worth documenting.
451 Here's a list which is probably not complete/correct: align, allout,
452 artist, ansi-color, array, battery, calculator, cdl, cmuscheme,
453 completion, cua, delim-col, dirtrack, double, echistory, elide-head,
454 easymenu, expand, flow-ctrl, format [format-alist],
455 generic/generic-x [various modes], kermit, log-edit, ledit
456 [obsolete?], makesum, midnight [other than in Kill Buffer node],
457 mouse-copy [?], mouse-drag, mouse-sel, net-utils, rcompile,
458 snmp-mode [?], soundex [should be interactive?], strokes [start from
459 the web page], talk, thingatpt [interactive functions?], type-break,
460 vcursor, xscheme, zone-mode [?], mlconvert [?], iso-cvt, iso-swed,
461 swedish, feedmail [?], uce, bruce, gametree, meese, page-ext,
462 refbib, refer, scribe, sgml-mode, spell, texinfo, underline,
463 cmacexp, hideif, mantemp [obsolete?], pcomplete, assoc, xml,
464 cvs-status (should be described in PCL-CVS manual); other progmodes,
465 probably in separate manual.
467 ** Convert the XPM bitmaps to PPM, replace the PBMs with them and scrap
468 the XPMs so that the colour versions work generally. (Requires care
469 with the colour used for the transparent regions.)
471 ** Convenient access to the `values' variable. It would be nice to have an
472 interface that would show you the printed reps of the elements of the
473 list in a menu, let you select one of the values, and put it into some
474 other variable, without changing the value of `values'.
476 ** (Controlled by a flag) make open and close syntax match exactly,
477 i.e. `(' doesn't match `]'.
479 ** Specify parameter ID-FORMAT in all calls to `file-attributes' and
480 `directory-files-and-attributes' where attributes UID or GID are used.
481 Whenever possible, use value 'string.
482 When done, change meaning of default value from 'integer to 'string.
483 If value 'integer is used nowhere, remove the parameter ID-FORMAT from
484 the definition of `file-attributes' and `directory-files-and-attributes'
487 ** Make language-info-alist customizable. Currently a user can customize
488 only the variable `current-language-environment'.
490 ** Improve language environment handling so that Emacs can fit
491 better to a users locale. Currently Emacs uses utf-8 language
492 environment for all utf-8 locales, thus a user in ja_JP.UTF-8 locale
493 are also put in utf-8 lang. env. In such a case, it is
494 better to use Japanese lang. env. but prefer utf-8 coding system.
496 ** Enhance locale handling: handle language, territory and charset
497 orthogonally and de-emphasize language environments. Use the locale
498 to set up more things, such as fontsets, the default Ispell
499 dictionary, diary format, calendar holidays and display, quoting
500 characters and phrase boundaries, sentence endings, collation for
501 sorting (at least for unicodes), HTTP Accept-language, patterns for
502 directory listings and compilation messages, yes-or-no replies,
503 common menu items when the toolkit supports it ... `locale-info'
504 needs extending for LC_COLLATE &c. [fx started on this.]
506 ** Eliminate the current restriction on header printing by ps-print.
507 Currently, a header can contain only single 1-byte charset in
510 ** In ps-print, provide an user friendly interface to specify fonts.
512 ** OpenType font support for various complex scripts (e.g. Devanagari).
513 As X protocal doesn't provide a way to access OpenType Layout Tables
514 in a OpenType font of a server side, we need a way to utilize local
515 fonts (perhaps by directly using the Freetype library or indirectly
518 ** Enhance word boundary detection for such a script that doesn't use
519 space at word boundary (e.g. Thai).
521 ** Implement interface programs with major Japanese conversion server
522 in lib-src so that they can be used from the input method
523 "japanese". Currently, most Japanese users are using external
524 packages (e.g. tamago, anthy) or an input method via XIM.
526 ** Let LEIM handle the Mode_switch key like XIM does (i.e. a toggle like C-\
527 but which can also be used as a modifier).
529 ** Improve Help buffers: Change the face of previously visited links (like
530 Info, but also with regard to namespace), add a forward button to make the
531 Help buffer more browser like and gives the value of lisp expressions
532 e.g auto-mode-alist, the right face. [nickrob@snap.net.nz has a patch
533 for this for inclusion after 22.1].
535 ** Possibly make `list-holidays' eval items in the calendar-holidays variable.
537 <http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2006-02/msg01034.html>.
538 [rgm@gnu.org will look at this after 22.1]
540 ** Possibly make cal-dst use the system timezone database directly.
542 <http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-pretest-bug/2006-11/msg00060.html>
546 ** Cleanup all the GC_ mark bit stuff -- there is no longer any distinction
547 since the mark bit is no longer stored in the Lisp_Object itself.
549 ** Merge ibuffer.el and buff-menu.el.
550 More specifically do what's needed to make ibuffer.el the default,
551 or just an extension of buff-menu.el.
553 ** Use pcomplete by default in shell-mode.
554 This means to make it behave (by default) more like the current code.
555 Use it also for read-shell-command, M-x compile, ...
557 ** Merge sendmail.el and messages.el.
558 Probably not a complete merge, but at least arrange for messages.el to be
559 a derived mode of sendmail.el. Or arrange for messages.el to be split
560 into a small core and "the rest" so that we use less resources as long as
561 we stick to the features provided in sendmail.el.
563 ** Replace gmalloc.c with the modified Doug Lea code from the current
564 GNU libc so that the special mmapping of buffers can be removed --
565 that apparently loses under Solaris, at least. [fx has mostly done
568 ** Rewrite make-docfile to be clean and maintainable.
570 ** Add an inferior-comint-minor-mode to capture the common set of operations
571 offered by major modes that offer an associated inferior
572 comint-derived mode. I.e. basically make cmuscheme.el/inf-lisp.el generic.
573 For use by sml-mode, python-mode, tex-mode, scheme-mode, lisp-mode,
574 haskell-mode, tuareg-mode, ...
576 ** Make SYNC_INPUT the default.
577 All loops using immediate_quit need to be checked to ensure that
578 C-g can interrupt them, in case of an infinite loop. Once we
579 switch to using SYNC_INPUT, we can remove the BLOCK_INPUTs in the
580 allocation functions (allocate_string etc.) without worrying about
583 ** Add "link" button class
584 Add a standard button-class named "link", and make all other link-like
585 button classes inherit from it. Set the default face of the "link" button
586 class to the standard "link" face.
590 ** a two-char comment-starter whose two chars are symbol constituents will
591 not be noticed if it appears within a word.
593 ** Fix unexelf.c to handle the .data.rel and .data.rel.local
594 sections made by GCC 3.4 on IRIX.
597 This file is part of GNU Emacs.
599 GNU Emacs is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
600 it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
601 the Free Software Foundation; either version 2, or (at your option)
604 GNU Emacs is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
605 but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
606 MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
607 GNU General Public License for more details.
609 You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
610 along with GNU Emacs; see the file COPYING. If not, write to the
611 Free Software Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor,
612 Boston, MA 02110-1301, USA.
614 ;;; arch-tag: b0a3e40b-726a-457d-9999-ba848321b036