3 If you are ready to start working on any of these TODO items, we
4 appreciate your help; please write to emacs-devel@gnu.org so we can be
5 aware that the problem is being addressed, and talk with you how to do
6 it best. Since Emacs is an FSF-copyrighted packages, please be
7 prepared to sign legal papers to transfer the copyright on your work
10 Small but important fixes needed in existing features:
12 * Make compile.el record the markers that point to error loci
13 on text properties in the error message lines.
17 * Provide user-friendly ways to list all available font families,
18 display a font as a sample, etc. [fx is looking at multilingual
19 font selection for Emacs 22.]
21 * Program Enriched mode to read and save in RTF. [Is there actually a
22 decent single definition of RTF?]
24 * Implement something better than the current Refill mode. This
25 probably needs some primitive support.
27 * Implement primitive and higher-level functions to allow filling
28 properly with variable-pitch faces.
30 * Implement a smoother vertical scroll facility, one that allows
31 C-v to scroll through a tall image.
33 * Implement other text formatting properties.
34 ** Footnotes that can appear either in place or at the end of the page.
35 ** text property that says "don't break line in middle of this".
36 Don't break the line between two characters that have the
37 same value of this property.
38 ** Discretionary hyphens that are not visible when they are at end of line.
40 * Make movemail work with IMAP.
42 * Internationalize Emacs's messages. [Note that this is of limited
43 use until the menus can display multilingual text. It also doesn't
44 address important issues like using the names of symbols essentially
45 as documentation, e.g. in command names and Custom. -- fx]
47 * Make the Lucid menu widget display multilingual text. [This
48 probably needs to be done from actual Emacs buffers, either directly
49 in the menu or by rendering in an unmapped window and copying the
50 pixels. Note that the relevant Xlib functions assume a specific
51 locale; that isn't good enough even if X can render the arbitrary
52 text, which it often can't as far as I can tell. -- fx]
54 * Remove the limitation that window and frame widths and heights can
55 be only full columns/lines.
57 * Move fringe to be displayed between display margins and text area.
58 [KFS is looking into this].
60 * Set fringe widths per-window/per-buffer.
62 * Make fringe bitmaps user configurable. Maybe add ability to add
63 additional bitmaps to the fringe from lisp.
65 Other features we would like:
67 * Have a command suggestion help system that recognizes patterns
68 of commands which could be replaced with a simpler common command.
69 It should not make more than one suggestion per 10 minutes.
71 * Add a way to define input methods by computing them (when first used)
72 from other input methods. Then redefine C-x 8 to use a
73 user-selected input method, with the default being the union of
74 latin-1-prefix and latin-1-postfix.
76 * Implement a clean way to use different major modes for
77 different parts of a buffer.
79 * Give start-process the ability to direct standard-error
80 output to a different filter.
82 * Make desktop.el save the "frame configuration" of Emacs (in some
85 * Give desktop.el a feature to switch between different named
88 * Replace finder.el with something that generates an Info file
89 which gives the same information through a menu structure. [Dave
90 Love started on this.]
92 * Implement a variant of uncompress.el or jka-compr.el that works with
93 GNU Privacy Guard for encryption. [Code exists but isn't assigned.]
95 * Save undo information in files, and reload it when needed
98 * Merge the Emacs regex.c with the Glibc regex.c.
99 They split off a few years ago through negligence.
101 * Change the Windows NT menu code
102 so that it handles the deep_p argument and avoids
103 regenerating the whole menu bar menu tree except
104 when the user tries to use the menubar.
106 This requires the RIT to forward the WM_INITMENU message to
107 the main thread, and not return from that message until the main
108 thread has processed the MENU_BAR_ACTIVATE_EVENT and regenerated
109 the whole menu bar. In the mean time, it should process other messages.
111 * Get some major packages installed: W3/url (development version needs
112 significant work), PSGML, Mule-UCS. Check the assignments file for other
113 packages which might go in and have been missed.
115 * Make keymaps a first-class Lisp object (this means a rewrite of
116 keymap.c). What should it do apart from being opaque ?
117 multiple inheritance ? faster where-is ? no more fix_submap_inheritance ?
120 * Provide real menus on ttys. The MS-DOS implementation can serve as
121 an example how to do part of this.
123 * Implement popular parts of the rest of the CL functions as compiler
126 * Highlight rectangles (`mouse-track-rectangle-p' in XEmacs). Already in CUA,
127 but it's a valuable feature worth making more general.
129 * Support simultaneous tty and X frames.
131 * Provide MIME support for Rmail using the Gnus MIME library. [Maybe
132 not now feasible, given Gnus maintenance decisions. fx looked at
133 this and can say where some of the problems are.]
135 * Eliminate the storm of warnings concerning char/unsigned char
136 mismatches that we get with proprietary compilers on various systems.
137 They make it difficult to spot the important warnings.
139 * Fix anything necessary to use `long long' EMACS_INTs with GCC.
141 * Split out parts of lisp.h and generate Makefile dependencies
146 * Make update-game-score work on systems that don't have strerror and difftime.
148 * Allow auto-compression-mode to use zlib calls if zlib is available.
149 [It's required for PNG, so may be linked anyhow.]
151 * Add a --pristine startup flag which does -q --no-site-file plus
152 ignoring X resources (Doze equivalents?) and most of the
153 environment. What should not be ignored needs consideration.
155 * Investigate using the language environment (or locale?) to set up
156 more things, such as the default Ispell dictionary, calendar
157 holidays, quoting characters?,...
159 * Improve the GC (generational, incremental). (We may be able to use
160 the Boehm collector.) [fx is working on this.]
162 * Check what hooks would help Emacspeak -- see the defadvising in W3.
164 * Implement some variety of (non-gtk) drag-and-drop support under X.
165 Using libdnd might be a good start.
167 * Add horizontal scroll bars.
169 * Provide an optional feature which computes a scroll bar slider's
170 size and its position from lines instead of characters.
172 * Make the Custom themes support do useful things.
174 * Adapt the gnuserv/gnudoit features for server/emacsclient.
176 * Investigate using GNU Lightning or similar system for incremental
177 compilation of selected bytecode functions to subrs. Converting CCL
178 programs to native code is probably the first thing to try, though.
180 * Add a feature to Info similar to "info --apropos SUBJECT".
182 * Add support for SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) rendering to
185 * Allow unknown image types to be rendered via an external program
186 converting them to, say, PBM (in the same way as PostScript?).
188 * Allow displaying an X window from an external program in a buffer,
189 e.g. to render graphics from Java applets. [gerd and/or wmperry
190 thought this was feasible.]
192 * Allow images (not just text) in the margin to be mouse-sensitive.
193 (Requires recursing through display properties). Provide some way
194 to simulate mouse-clicks on marginal text without a mouse.
196 * Implement Lisp functions to determine properly whether a character
197 is displayable (particularly needed in XFree 4, sigh). Use it to
198 define useful glyphs that may be displayed as images or unicodes
199 (with ASCIIfied fallback via latin1-disp). Examples include
200 box-drawing graphics in Custom buffers, W3 rules and tables, and
201 tree displays generally, mode-line mail indicator. [See work done
202 already for Emacs 22 and consult fx.]
204 * Do something to make rms happy with fx's dynamic loading, and use it
205 to implement things like auto-loaded buffer parsers and database
206 access in cases which need more than Lisp.
208 * Extend ps-print to deal with multiple font sizes, images, and extra
211 * Provide portable undumping using mmap (per gerd design).
213 * Replace gmalloc.c with the modified Doug Lea code from the current
214 GNU libc so that the special mmapping of buffers can be removed --
215 that apparently loses under Solaris, at least. [fx has mostly done
218 * Use the XIE X extension, if available, for image display.
220 * Make monochrome images display using the foreground and background
221 colors of the applicable faces.
223 * Add support for rendering antialiased text, probably using
226 * Rewrite make-docfile to be clean and maintainable.
228 * Port the conservative stack marking code of Emacs' garbage collector
229 to more systems, so that we can completely get rid of GCPROs.
231 * Reorder defcustom's in each package so that the more important
232 options come first in the Customize buffers. This could be done by
233 either rearranging the file (since options are shown in the order
234 they appear in the *.el files), or by adding a few :set-after
237 * Maybe document the features of libraries missing from the manual (or
238 ancillary manuals, including the Lisp manual in some cases).
239 This is not worth doing for all of these packages and we need not
240 aim for completeness, but some may be worth documenting.
242 Here's a list which is probably not complete/correct: align, allout,
243 artist, ansi-color, array, battery, calculator, cdl, cmuscheme,
244 completion, cua, delim-col, dirtrack, double, echistory, elide-head,
245 easymenu, expand, flow-ctrl, format [format-alist],
246 generic/generic-x [various modes], kermit, log-edit, ledit
247 [obsolete?], makesum, midnight [other than in Kill Buffer node],
248 mouse-copy [?], mouse-drag, mouse-sel, net-utils, rcompile,
249 snmp-mode [?], soundex [should be interactive?], strokes [start from
250 the web page], talk, thingatpt [interactive functions?], type-break,
251 vcursor, xscheme, zone-mode [?], mlconvert [?], iso-cvt, iso-swed,
252 swedish, feedmail [?], uce, bruce, gametree, meese, page-ext,
253 refbib, refer, scribe, sgml-mode, spell, texinfo, underline,
254 cmacexp, hideif, mantemp [obsolete?], pcomplete, assoc, xml,
255 cvs-status (should be described in PCL-CVS manual); other progmodes,
256 probably in separate manual.
258 * Provide a means to extract image-relative coordinates from mouse
259 clicks on images. (Needed for W3, at least.) Also useful for W3
260 and Gnus: allow images to scroll properly.
262 * Convert the XPM bitmaps to PPM, replace the PBMs with them and scrap
263 the XPMs so that the colour versions work generally. (Requires care
264 with the colour used for the transparent regions.)
266 * Convenient access to the `values' variable. It would be nice to have an
267 interface that would show you the printed reps of the elements of the
268 list in a menu, let you select one of the values, and put it into some
269 other variable, without changing the value of `values'.
271 * Fix skip-chars-{for,back}ward to allow character classes.