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