source: release/1.11/source/cocoa-ide/hemlock/doc/misc/things-to-do.txt

-*- Mode: Text; Package: Hemlock; Editor: t -*-




;;;; X problems.

Compute mininum width of a window group by taking the maximum of all the
windows' font-widths, each multiplied by minimum-window-columns.  Right now it
just uses the default font or current window.

Compute minimum window split correctly: look at current window's font-height
and new window's font-height, extra height pixels, whether each has a modeline,
and minimum-window-lines to determine if we can split the current window.

Server not implementing DRAW-IMAGE-GLYPHS correctly, so we don't have to do our
pixmap hack.




;;;; Bill and/or Rob.

Make editor-error messages; that is just make many of the (editor-error)
forms have some string to be printed.
   Importance: often beeps and don't know why.
   Difficulty: pervasive search for EDITOR-ERROR.

Probably the ERROR for trying to modify a read-only buffer could/should be an
EDITOR-ERROR.  Maybe the error message should be a Hemlock variable that can be
set for certain buffers or modes.

Make definition editing different.  Maybe only one command that offers some
appropriate default, requiring confirmation.  Maybe some way to rightly know to
edit the function named under a #'name instead of the function name in a
function position.  Think about whizzy, general definition location logging and
finding mechanism that is user extensible.

Think about regular expression searching.
   Importance: it would be used weekly by some and daily by others.

Make illegal setting window width and height, (or support this).

Think about example init file for randoms.  It should show most of the simple
through intermediate customizations one would want to do starting to use
Hemlock.
  setting variables
  file type hooks
  hooks
  transposing two keys
  changing modifiers
  
DEFMODE should take a keyword argument for the modeline name, so "Fill"
could be named "Auto Fill" but show "Fill" in the modeline (similarly with
"Spell" and "Save").
   Importance: low.
   Difficulty: low.

Optional doc strings for commands?
   Importance: suggested by a couple people.
   Difficulty: ???

Get a real italic comment mode.
   Importance: some people want it, like Scott.
   Difficulty: hard to do right.

Line-wrap-character a user feature?  Per device?  Per device set from Hvar?
   Importance: a few people set this already for bitmap devices.
   Difficulty: low.
   Bill should just throw this in.

When MESSAGE'ing the line of a matching open paren, can something be done to
make the exact open paren more pronounced -- SUBSEQ'ing the line string?
   Importance: low
   Difficulty: one line frob to major echo area changes.

Do something about active region highlighting and blank lines.  Consider
changing redisplay to be able to hack some glyph onto the line, a virtual
newline or something.
   Importance: blank lines at the ends of the active region can be confusing.
   Difficulty: unknown difficult changes to redisplay.

Change redisplay on bitmaps to draw top down?  Currently line writes are queued
going down the window image but the queue is written backwards.
   Importance: low, two people commented on how it looks funny.
   Difficulty: unknown, but probably little.

Disallow tty I/O when the tty is in a bad state.  Since editor is sharing
Unix standard input with *terminal-io*, doing reads on this is bad among
other problems.
   Importance: necessary or non-experienced users.
   Difficulty: slight.  Error system wants to use *terminal-io* if you go
               into a break loop from the editor.
   Bill.

Make Lisp indentation respect user indentation even when in a form with known
special arguments?
   Importance: noticeable correctness.
   Difficulty: Lucid wrote this already with LOOP macro.
   Rob.
Make Lisp motion that exceeds the parsed region lose more gracefully by
informing the user, possibly offering to enlarge the parsing parameters.
   Importance: very deceptive as it is currently.
   Difficulty: ???
   Rob.
Lisp motion fails to handle correctly vertical bar syntax; for example,
      package:|foo|
   Importance: correctness, not too necessary
   Difficulty: ???
"Editor Evaluate Defun" does not handle multiple value returns correctly
... if we admit that this is often used to evaluate non-DEFUN top-level
forms.
   Importance: user convenience.
   Difficulty: low.

Super-confirm select buffer.  Super confirm means "make this be a legal
input".  Has no interaction with prompting function interface.  More
generally, make a *super-confirm-parse-function* that can be bound around
prompters.  One suggestion when prompting for a buffer is to make it, but
another suggestion is to find file some appropriate file.
   Importance: multiple people requested.
   Difficulty: low.
   Bill.
A super-confirm for a more facist "Find File" that disallowed creating buffers
when the file didn't exist could tell the command to really create the buffer.

Displayed-p shouldn't directly call update-window-image, or perhaps uwi should
be changed to check if the ticks and whatnot indicate recomputation is needed.
   Importance: minor efficiency hack and maybe a little cleaner.
   Difficulty: low.
   Bill.

Fix line-length for hemlock output streams.  The following example causes lines
to brek incorrectly in "Eval" mode but not in "Typescript" mode:
   (defun dup (x n &aux r) (dolist (i n r) (push x r)))
   (dup 'a 100)     ;lines wrap due to faulty line breaking
   (dup 'aa 100)    ;lines wrap due to faulty line breaking
   (dup 'aaa 100)   ;now lines break correctly
   Importance: correctness.  It's not screwing anyone.
   Difficulty: depends on what the right thing is.

Termcap bug:
   setenv TERMCAP "foobar:li#65:tc=vt102:"
   set term = foobar
This causes an EOF unexpectedly on the string stream.  This is because the
the termcap parsing stuff wasn't written to go all the way back to the top
entry point to determine what file to use when the TERMCAP variable had an
indirection.  The code currently just goes to the beginning of the stream
and looks for the new tty name.

Make prompt text not part of input buffer.  Do some magical thing to solve
the problem of having special echo area commands that simply get around the
prompt text in the echo are buffer.
   Importance: low sense problem is currently somewhat taken care of.
               Possibly resolve problem when new Hemlock environment stuff
               goes in.
   Difficulty: Magical in origin.
   Rob.

Commonify everything.  Make everything portable that could be made so (file
system extensions, character att. finding, string ops, etc.) and document
our expectations of the non-portable stuff we lean on.  Provide portable
code for stuff done in assembler.
   Some known problems:
      %sp- functions aren't documented and don't have portable code for
         them.
      semantics of initial values versus declared type.
      :error-file to COMPILE-FILE calls.

   Importance: cleanliness and portability ease for those who want our
               code.
   Difficulty: identify the problems and alter some code.
   Bill and Rob.

Fix things that keep text from getting gc'ed.  Buffer local things keep
pointer to buffer.
   Importance: could be important, maybe nothing is wrong.
   Difficulty: identifying problems.
   Bill or Rob.

Two reproducible window image builder bugs:
THIS IS NUMBER ONE:
I wrote this command:
   (defcommand "Fetch Input" (p)
     "Does \"Point to Here\" followed by \"Reenter Interactive Input\"."
     "Does \"Point to Here\" followed by \"Reenter Interactive Input\"."
     (declare (ignore p))
     (point-to-here-command nil)
     (reenter-interactive-input-command nil))
I made the following bindings:
   (bind-key "Fetch Input" #\hyper-leftdown :mode "Eval")
   (bind-key "Fetch Input" #\hyper-leftdown :mode "Typescript")
   (bind-key "Do Nothing" #\hyper-leftup :mode "Eval")
   (bind-key "Do Nothing" #\hyper-leftup :mode "Typescript")
In an interactive buffer I typed hyper-leftdown twice on the same line and
got the following error:
   Error in function HEMLOCK-INTERNALS::CACHED-REAL-LINE-LENGTH.
   Vector index, 14700, out of bounds.
This index is always the one you get no matter what line of input you try to
enter twice.
;;;
THIS IS NUMBER TWO:
Put point at the beginning of a small defun that has at least some interior
lines in addition to the "(defun ..." line and the last line of the routine.
Mark the defun and save the region.  Now, yank the defun, and note that the
beginning of the second instance starts at the end of the line the yanked copy
ends on.  Now type c-w.  You'll delete the yanked copy, and the lines that
should not have been touched at all end up with font marks.  Interestingly the
first line of the defun and the last don't get any font marks.
   Importance: well, they are reproducible, and they're pretty ugly.  No one
               has noticed these yet though.
   Difficulty: Rob and I didn't conjure up the bugs after a casual inspection.
   Bill AND Rob

Consider a GNU-style undo where action is undo-able.
   Importance: low, but people point it out as an inadequacy of Hemlock.
   Difficulty: possibly very hard.  Have to figure out what's necessary first.
   Bill and Rob



;;;; Mailer stuff.

Find all message-info-msgs sets and refs, changing them from possible list
values to always be a simple-string value.  Maybe must leave a list (or make
another slot) if I need to indicate that I can't use the value as a msg-id.
The only problem is coming through SHOW-PROMPTED-MESSAGE.  This could pick or
something to really know if there were more than one message or not.

Write "Refile Message and Show Next".

Do something about message headers when reading mail.  Suggestions include a
list of headers components that get deleted from the buffer and simply
scrolling the window past the "Received:" lines.

Add more folder support and possibly something specific for Bovik groveling.
For example, rehashing the cached folder names and/or adding new ones from a
folder spec or root directory (allows adding the bovik folders).

Consistency problems:
   Expunging message should not JUST delete headers buffers and their
   associated message buffers.  There could be independent message buffers with
   invalid message id's.  Since these are independent, though, we might not
   want to gratuitously delete them.

   "Headers Delete Message" should check for message buffers when virtual
   message deletion is not used, deleting them I suppose.  Instead of just
   making headers buffers consistent.




;;;; Spelling stuff.

This stuff is probably for Rob or Bill, but think about undergrad
dispatching before actually implementing it.

Two apostrophes precede a punctuation character, as in:
        ``This is a very common occurrence in TeX.''
"Correct Buffer Spelling" complains that '' is an unknown word.  The problem
doesn't show up if the character preceding the apostrophes is alphabetic.

"Correct Last Misspelled Word" should try to transpose the space on the
ends of a word if there are more than one misspelling (adjacent?).  This
would have to be done at the command level trying to correct different
words formed from the buffer.

Fahlman would like to see a list of words that are treated as errors, even
though they may be in the dictionary.  These are considered common typos made
that actually are rarely-used words.  These would be flagged as errors for the
user to do a conscious double check on.

When the spelling correction stuff cannot find any possible corrections, it
could try inserting a space between letters that still form legal words,
checking the two new words are in the dictionary.
   Importance: possibly pretty useful, especially with "Spell" mode.
   Difficulty: low to medium.
   Bill, possibly undergrad after I looked at it.

Fix "Undo Last Spelling" correction interaction with auto-fill.  When this
command is invoked on a word that made auto-fill break the line, shit
happens.
   Importance: Rob noticed it.
   Difficulty: unknown.
   Bill or Rob.




;;;; User and Implementors Manuals

User Manual wall chart appendix based on systems (e.g., dired, mailer, Lisp
editing, spelling, etc.), then modes (e.g., "Headers", "Message", and "Draft"),
then whatever seems appropriate.

Point out that "Make Buffer Hook" runs after mode setup.




;;;; Things for undergrads.

Create "Remote Load File" and make "Load File" use it the way "Compile File"
uses "Remote Compile File".

Make "Insert Scribe Directive" undo-able, and make the "command" insertion
stuff use the active region.  Also, clean up terminology with respect to using
command and environment.
   Importance: it would be nice.
   Difficulty: little

Add a feature that notes modified or new lines, probably down in
HI::MODIFYING-BUFFER.  Then add interfaces for moving over these lines, moving
over text structures with these lines such as DEFUN's, paragraphs, etc.  Write
commands that display these in some way, compile them, etc.

Look at open paren highlighting and the Scribe bracket table stuff to make a
general bracket highlighter.  Possibly have to call function based on mode or
something since Lisp parens are found differently than Scribe brackets (Lisp
parse groveling versus counting open and close brackets).

Make hooks that are lists of function have list in the name, so users can know
easily whether to set this to a list or function.
   Importance: low.
   Difficulty: low, but pervasive.  must be careful.

Make FILTER-REGION not move all marks in the buffer to the end.  It should
affect each line, letting marks stay on a line, instead of deleting the whole
region and inserting a new one.
   Importance: low, but described behaviour is better than current behaviour.
   Difficulty: low.

Make some "Auto Save Access" variable, so users don't have to write fully
protected auto save files.  Possibly there could be some variable to that
represents Hemlock's default file writing protection.
   Importance: one person requested.
   Difficulty: easy.

Make "Save" mode on a first write or on startup check for a .CKP file.  If it
is there and has a later write date than the file, warn the user before a save
could overwrite this file that potentially has good stuff in it from a previous
Lisp crash.
   Importance: good idea, though people should know to check.
   Difficulty: easier if done on start up.

We need Lisp-like movement in Text mode -- skipping parenthetic and quoted
expressions while ignoring some Lisp syntax stuff.  Either can write a few
commands that do what we expect, or we can get really clever with the
pre-command parse checking and bounds rules for Text mode.  May even be able to
get the right thing to happen with code fragments in documents.
   Importance: would be pretty convenient to have it work right all the time.
   Difficulty: will take some thinking and playing around.  Rob or Bill guidance.

Make "Extended Command" offer a default of the last command entered.

Make "Select Group" command take an optional argument for the group
pathname and group name.
   Importance: convenience for init files.
   Difficulty: low.

Put in buffer percentage.
   Importance: Lots of people want it.
   Difficulty: Rob thinks he knows how to do it.
   Rob will tell some undergrad how to do it.

Make "Unexpand Abbrev" work when no expansion had been done -- test for
error condition was backwards.

Add modeline display of current eval server and current compile server, when
appropriate. 
   Importance: suggested by a couple people.  Low.
   Difficulty: none.
               Basically, just have to change string and function.

Make "Corrected xxx to yyy" messages use actual case of yyy that was
inserted into the buffer.
   Importance: more user friendly.
   Difficult: low.
   Anyone could do this, but it wouldn't be very educational for an
      undergrad. 

"Find all Symbols" does a FIND-ALL-SYMBOLS on previous or current form if
it is a symbol.  See code for "Where is Symbol" in Scott's
Hemlock-Init.Lisp file.
   Importance: probably quite useful.
   Difficulty: none.
   Anyone could grab Scott's code.

Make buffer read-only when visiting unwritable file?  Bill and Scott
vehemently disagreed with this, but thought a variable would make everyone
happy.
   Importance: one person suggested.
   Difficulty: low.
   Anyone could do this, but it wouldn't be very educational for an
      undergrad. 

Modify MAKE-BUFFER to error when buffer exists?
   Importance: more user friendly.
   Difficulty: none.
   Anybody could do this, but it wouldn't be very educational for an
      undergrad. 

Warn when unable to rename a buffer according to its file.  This occurs
when writing files.
   Importance: more user friendly.
   Difficulty: none.
   Anyone could do this.
Uniquify buffer names by tacking a roman numeral on the end?
   Importance: I don't know why this is here.
   Difficulty: low.
   Anyone could do this.

Automatically save word abbrevs?
   Importance: low.
   Difficulty: low.
   Some undergrad could do this.

Automatically save named keyboard macros?  Maybe on request?
   Importance: other editors can do it.
   Difficulty: this is non-trivial since our kbmacs are based on their own
               little interpreter.
   Medium undergrad task.

Make nested prompts work.
   Importance: some day this might be useful.
   Difficulty: medium.
   Upper level undergrad could do this.

Make character searches deal with newlines.
   Importance: correctness.
   Difficulty: medium.
   Upper level undergrad.

Put argument type checks in the Hemlock primitives.
   Importance: low, the compiler should do this from type declaration
               (cool?!).
   Difficulty: work in a lot of places.
   Undergrad could do the things Rob or Bill say.

Add a "Preferred File Types" to work in coordination with "Ignore File Types".
   Importance: low, suggested by one user.
   Difficulty: minimal.

Write separate search and i-search commands that do case-sensitive searches, so
user's don't have to set the Hvar for one search.
   Importance: low.
   Difficulty: low.

Add a write-region function which writes to a stream.
   Importance: low.
   Difficulty: medium.
   Undergrad.




;;;; The great rewrite and cleanup.

Compilation order.  Cleanup up defvars, defhvars, proclaims, etc. for clean
compilation of Hemlock in a Lisp without one.  Rename ED and HI packages
and start cleaning up compilation.  Defvars should go near pertinent code,
and proclaims should do the rest.  Do something about macros, rompsite, and
main.
   Importance: necessary for those taking our code and sets better example.
   Difficulty: few days of work.
   Bill.

Hemlock package cleanup -- exporting Hemlock stuff, so users don't live in
ED package.
 Find primitives to export and describe in Command Implementor's Manual.
 Export existing command names in a separate file.
 DEFCOMMAND always interns in current package.
 Variables
  One global table.
  DEFHVAR only at top level.  Interns into current package.  WHAT ABOUT SITE-INIT?
  BIND-VARIABLE, a new form, will be used at top level or in setup
   functions to establish default values.
 Find all uses of FIND-PACKAGE, *hemlock-package*, etc. since these are
  suspect in the new package regime.
 Put DEFVAR's (esp. from Main.Lisp) in appropriate files, putting PROCLAIM's
   in a single file or in files with compiler warnings.
      Importance: really needs to be done along with environment stuff.
      Difficulty: pervasive changes to get right.
      Bill!

Generalized environments:
  Generalize notion of environment to first-class objects.
  can inherit stuff from other environments.  Shadowing for conflict
  resolution.  Transparent key bindings another sort of interaction.
  If we retain modes as a primitive concept, then how do they interact?
  If not, how do we get the effect?  Each buffer has an environment.
  This is normally the composition of the default environment and
  various mode environments.

  Turning modes on and off is simply adding and removing the mode's environment
  from the buffer's environment's inherit list.  The only sticky issue is the
  order of the inheritence.  We could assign each environment a precedence.

  I guess we could punt modes as a primitive concept.  The only thing this
  wouldn't provide that modes do is a namespace and the major/minor
  distinction.  Setting the major mode is just frobbing the lowest precedence
  environment in a buffer.  A major mode is distinct from a minor mode in that
  it inherits the global environment.  An interesting question is at which
  level precedences should be implemented.  We could have it be a property only
  of minor modes, which determines only the order in which a buffer inherits
  its minor modes, or we could make it a property of environments, and have it
  determine the total order of inheritance.  Probably the former is better: it
  simpler, and adequate.  Also, at the environment level, it is more powerful
  to be able to specify inheritance order on a per-case basis.

  Make mode-hooks be a mode-object slot rather than hemlock variables.  [a
  random cleanup]

  We change the (... &optional kind where) arguments to
  (... &optional where).  Where can be an environment such as
  *global-environment* (the default) or a buffer, or it can be a string, in
  which case it is interpreted as a mode name.

  Instead of having key binding transparentness be a property of modes or of
  commands, we make it a property of binding.  Each environment has separate
  key-tables for transparent and opaque bindings, and there is a
  Transparent-Bind-Key function that is used to make transparent key bindings.
  [... or something.  This would imply a delete-transparent-key-binding and
  prehaps other functions, so we might consider passing a transparent flag to
  the primitives.]

  *current-environment* is the current environment, which is normally eq to the
  current buffer.  Attributes and variables are implemented using deep-binding
  and caching.  Whenever there is any change to the inheritance structure or to
  variable or attribute bindings, then we just totally flush all the caches.
  The most frequent operation that would cause this to happen would be changing
  a mode in a buffer, which is rare enough so that there should be no problem.

  For variables, we just have a symbol-name X environment => binding cache.

  For attributes we have two caches: attribute X environment => value vector
  and attribute X environment X test-function => search vector.  The first
  translates an attribute and environment to a simple-vector that contains the
  current value for each character in that environment.  This is used for
  Character-Attribute and when the Find-Attribute cache misses.  When this
  cache misses, we fill the vector with a magic "unspecified" object, and then
  scan up the inheritance, filling in any bindings that are unspecified.  We
  could optimize this by noting in the character-attribute object when an
  attribute has no shadowings.  character-attribute hooks have to go away,
  since they depends on shallow-binding.

  Make Hemlock variables be typed.  Have a :type defhvar argument,
  variable-type function.  In implementation, create a test function for each
  variable so that we can efficiently check the type of each assigned value.
  This implies defhvar should be a macro.  We could make specifying the test
  function be an explicit feature, but the same effect could always be obtained
  with a Satisfies type specfier.

  Split binding of hvars from definition.  
      Bind-Variable Symbol-Name Value &Optional Where
  Creates a binding.  If :Value is specified to defhvar, then it creates a
  global binding of that value.  If no :Value is specified, then there is no
  global binding.  We could flush the :Mode and :Buffer options, and require an
  explicit Bind-Variable to be done in this case, or we could still allow them.
  It would probably be better to flush them, since it would break code that is
  doing run-time defhvars to make buffer-local variables.  Perhaps we would
  flush only :Buffer, since it is clearly useless, while being able to give an
  initial mode binding may be useless.

  All variable attributes except for value are global.  Hooks are global.  The
  concept of a hook is somewhat dubious in the presence of non-global bindings.
  It might be semi-useful to invoke the hook on each new binding in addition to
  on each set.

     Importance: Next big step for Hemlock.
     Difficulty: Two months.
     Bill will do this.

Multiple font support:
 Figure what kind of multi-font stuff we want to do.
 Bogus to use integer constants for facecodes.  It is reasonable within the
 font mark, but the user interface should be keywords for facecodes.
   Importance: no documented font support currently.  Really need it.
   Difficulty: includes massively reworking redisplay data structures.
   Bill and Rob.




;;;; Things to think about.

;;; These are things that have been thought of, but we don't know much more
;;; about them.

Some general facility for users to associate definition locations with kinds of
things and/or forms.

What's the right way to be in a comment in some Lisp file and have filling,
spelling, and whatever work out just right.  Possibly regions with environment
information.  Maybe with a whole new hierarchical text representation, this
would fall out.

Synchronization/exclusion issues:
    Currently there are non-modification primitives that are looking into a
    buffer assuming it will not change out from under the primitive.  We
    need to identify these places and exactly what the nature of this
    problem is (including whether it exists).  Probably we need to make
    non-trivial text examination primitives use without-interrupts so that
    they see a consistent state.

    Find other places where exclusion is needed:
        Redisplay?
        Typescript code?

Online documentation stuff: What to do and how to do it.  Rob has some
notes on this from a year or two ago.
   Importance: something to do.
   Difficulty: high.
   maybe no one.

Think about general "Save My Editor State".  Can generalize notion of
stateful things? -- Word abbrevs, keyboard macros, defindent, spelling
stuff, etc.  This could be the last thing we ever do to Hemlock.
   Importance: low.
   Difficulty: very.
   ???




;;;; New Eval Servers

Do something about slaves dieing in init files.  Lisps start up and first load
init.lisp.  When a slave does this, it goes into the debugger before connecting
to the editor.