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 package, 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.
15 * Fix the kill/yank treatment of invisible text. At the moment,
16 invisible text is placed in the kill-ring, so that the contents of
17 the ring may not correspond to the text as displayed to the user. It
18 ought to be possible to omit text which is invisible (due to a
19 text-property, overlay, or selective display) from the kill-ring.
23 * Provide user-friendly ways to list all available font families,
24 display a font as a sample, etc. [fx is looking at multilingual
25 font selection for Emacs 22.]
27 * Program Enriched mode to read and save in RTF. [Is there actually a
28 decent single definition of RTF? Maybe see info at
29 http://latex2rtf.sourceforge.net/.]
31 * Implement something better than the current Refill mode. This
32 probably needs some primitive support.
34 * Implement primitive and higher-level functions to allow filling
35 properly with variable-pitch faces.
37 * Implement a smoother vertical scroll facility, one that allows
38 C-v to scroll through a tall image.
40 * Implement other text formatting properties.
41 ** Footnotes that can appear either in place or at the end of the page.
42 ** text property that says "don't break line in middle of this".
43 Don't break the line between two characters that have the
44 same value of this property.
45 ** Discretionary hyphens that are not visible when they are at end of line.
47 * Make movemail work with IMAP.
49 * Internationalize Emacs's messages. [Note that this is of limited
50 use until the menus can display multilingual text. It also doesn't
51 address important issues like using the names of symbols essentially
52 as documentation, e.g. in command names and Custom. -- fx]
54 * Make the Lucid menu widget display multilingual text. [This
55 probably needs to be done from actual Emacs buffers, either directly
56 in the menu or by rendering in an unmapped window and copying the
57 pixels. Note that the relevant Xlib functions assume a specific
58 locale; that isn't good enough even if X can render the arbitrary
59 text, which it often can't as far as I can tell. -- fx] [The gtk
60 port now displays multilingual text in menus, but only insofar as
61 Emacs can encode it as utf-8 and gtk can display the result.]
63 * Remove the limitation that window and frame widths and heights can
64 be only full columns/lines.
66 * Move fringe to be displayed between display margins and text area.
67 [KFS is looking into this].
69 * Set fringe widths per-window/per-buffer.
71 * Make fringe bitmaps user configurable. Maybe add ability to add
72 additional bitmaps to the fringe from lisp.
74 Other features we would like:
76 * Have a command suggestion help system that recognizes patterns
77 of commands which could be replaced with a simpler common command.
78 It should not make more than one suggestion per 10 minutes.
80 * Add a way to define input methods by computing them (when first used)
81 from other input methods. Then redefine C-x 8 to use a
82 user-selected input method, with the default being the union of
83 latin-1-prefix and latin-1-postfix.
85 * Implement a clean way to use different major modes for
86 different parts of a buffer.
88 * Give start-process the ability to direct standard-error
89 output to a different filter.
91 * Make desktop.el save the "frame configuration" of Emacs (in some
94 * Give desktop.el a feature to switch between different named
97 * Replace finder.el with something that generates an Info file
98 which gives the same information through a menu structure. [Dave
99 Love started on this.]
101 * Implement a variant of uncompress.el or jka-compr.el that works with
102 GNU Privacy Guard for encryption. [Code exists but isn't assigned.
103 See the Gnus development sources for assigned code concerning GPG
104 use with mail, which is probably a good start.]
106 * Save undo information in files, and reload it when needed
109 * Merge the Emacs regex.c with the Glibc regex.c.
110 They split off a few years ago through negligence.
112 * Change the Windows NT menu code
113 so that it handles the deep_p argument and avoids
114 regenerating the whole menu bar menu tree except
115 when the user tries to use the menubar.
117 This requires the RIT to forward the WM_INITMENU message to
118 the main thread, and not return from that message until the main
119 thread has processed the MENU_BAR_ACTIVATE_EVENT and regenerated
120 the whole menu bar. In the mean time, it should process other messages.
122 * Get some major packages installed: W3/url (development version needs
123 significant work), PSGML. Check the assignments file for other
124 packages which might go in and have been missed.
126 * Make keymaps a first-class Lisp object (this means a rewrite of
127 keymap.c). What should it do apart from being opaque ?
128 multiple inheritance ? faster where-is ? no more fix_submap_inheritance ?
131 * Provide real menus on ttys. The MS-DOS implementation can serve as
132 an example how to do part of this.
134 * Implement popular parts of the rest of the CL functions as compiler
137 * Highlight rectangles (`mouse-track-rectangle-p' in XEmacs). Already in CUA,
138 but it's a valuable feature worth making more general.
140 * Support simultaneous tty and X frames.
142 * Provide MIME support for Rmail using the Gnus MIME library. [Maybe
143 not now feasible, given Gnus maintenance decisions. fx looked at
144 this and can say where some of the problems are.]
146 * Eliminate the storm of warnings concerning char/unsigned char
147 mismatches that we get with proprietary compilers on various systems.
148 They make it difficult to spot the important warnings.
150 * Fix anything necessary to use `long long' EMACS_INTs with GCC.
152 * Split out parts of lisp.h and generate Makefile dependencies
157 * Allow auto-compression-mode to use zlib calls if zlib is available.
158 [It's required for PNG, so may be linked anyhow.]
160 * Add a --pristine startup flag which does -q --no-site-file plus
161 ignoring X resources (Doze equivalents?) and most of the
162 environment. What should not be ignored needs consideration.
164 * Investigate using the language environment (or locale?) to set up
165 more things, such as the default Ispell dictionary, calendar
166 holidays, quoting characters?,...
168 * Improve the GC (generational, incremental). (We may be able to use
169 the Boehm collector.) [See the Boehm-GC branch in CVS for work on
172 * Check what hooks would help Emacspeak -- see the defadvising in W3.
174 * Implement some variety of (non-gtk) drag-and-drop support under X.
175 Using libdnd might be a good start.
177 * Add horizontal scroll bars.
179 * Provide an optional feature which computes a scroll bar slider's
180 size and its position from lines instead of characters.
182 * Make the Custom themes support do useful things.
184 * Investigate using GNU Lightning or similar system for incremental
185 compilation of selected bytecode functions to subrs. Converting CCL
186 programs to native code is probably the first thing to try, though.
188 * Add a feature to Info similar to "info --apropos SUBJECT".
190 * Add support for SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) rendering to
193 * Allow unknown image types to be rendered via an external program
194 converting them to, say, PBM (in the same way as PostScript?).
196 * Allow displaying an X window from an external program in a buffer,
197 e.g. to render graphics from Java applets. [gerd and/or wmperry
198 thought this was feasible.]
200 * Allow images (not just text) in the margin to be mouse-sensitive.
201 (Requires recursing through display properties). Provide some way
202 to simulate mouse-clicks on marginal text without a mouse.
204 * Implement Lisp functions to determine properly whether a character
205 is displayable (particularly needed in XFree 4, sigh). Use it to
206 define useful glyphs that may be displayed as images or unicodes
207 (with ASCIIfied fallback via latin1-disp). Examples include
208 box-drawing graphics in Custom buffers, W3 rules and tables, and
209 tree displays generally, mode-line mail indicator. [See work done
210 already for Emacs 22 and consult fx.]
212 * Do something to make rms happy with fx's dynamic loading, and use it
213 to implement things like auto-loaded buffer parsers and database
214 access in cases which need more than Lisp.
216 * Extend ps-print to deal with multiple font sizes, images, and extra
219 * Provide portable undumping using mmap (per gerd design).
221 * Replace gmalloc.c with the modified Doug Lea code from the current
222 GNU libc so that the special mmapping of buffers can be removed --
223 that apparently loses under Solaris, at least. [fx has mostly done
226 * Use the XIE X extension, if available, for image display.
228 * Make monochrome images display using the foreground and background
229 colors of the applicable faces.
231 * Add support for rendering antialiased text, probably using
234 * Rewrite make-docfile to be clean and maintainable.
236 * Port the conservative stack marking code of Emacs' garbage collector
237 to more systems, so that we can completely get rid of GCPROs.
239 * Reorder defcustom's in each package so that the more important
240 options come first in the Customize buffers. This could be done by
241 either rearranging the file (since options are shown in the order
242 they appear in the *.el files), or by adding a few :set-after
245 * Maybe document the features of libraries missing from the manual (or
246 ancillary manuals, including the Lisp manual in some cases).
247 This is not worth doing for all of these packages and we need not
248 aim for completeness, but some may be worth documenting.
250 Here's a list which is probably not complete/correct: align, allout,
251 artist, ansi-color, array, battery, calculator, cdl, cmuscheme,
252 completion, cua, delim-col, dirtrack, double, echistory, elide-head,
253 easymenu, expand, flow-ctrl, format [format-alist],
254 generic/generic-x [various modes], kermit, log-edit, ledit
255 [obsolete?], makesum, midnight [other than in Kill Buffer node],
256 mouse-copy [?], mouse-drag, mouse-sel, net-utils, rcompile,
257 snmp-mode [?], soundex [should be interactive?], strokes [start from
258 the web page], talk, thingatpt [interactive functions?], type-break,
259 vcursor, xscheme, zone-mode [?], mlconvert [?], iso-cvt, iso-swed,
260 swedish, feedmail [?], uce, bruce, gametree, meese, page-ext,
261 refbib, refer, scribe, sgml-mode, spell, texinfo, underline,
262 cmacexp, hideif, mantemp [obsolete?], pcomplete, assoc, xml,
263 cvs-status (should be described in PCL-CVS manual); other progmodes,
264 probably in separate manual.
266 * Provide a means to extract image-relative coordinates from mouse
267 clicks on images. (Needed for W3, at least.) Also useful for W3
268 and Gnus: allow images to scroll properly.
270 * Convert the XPM bitmaps to PPM, replace the PBMs with them and scrap
271 the XPMs so that the colour versions work generally. (Requires care
272 with the colour used for the transparent regions.)
274 * Convenient access to the `values' variable. It would be nice to have an
275 interface that would show you the printed reps of the elements of the
276 list in a menu, let you select one of the values, and put it into some
277 other variable, without changing the value of `values'.
279 * Fix skip-chars-{for,back}ward to allow character classes.
281 * (Controlled by a flag) make open and close syntax match exactly,
282 i.e. `(' doesn't match `]'.
284 ;;; arch-tag: b0a3e40b-726a-457d-9999-ba848321b036