1 #+TITLE: Development notes/ideas
2 #+TODO: OPEN | CLOSED INVALID
6 ** OPEN Allow multiple elpher buffers [33%]
8 Shouldn't be too hard, just need elpher-current-node to be
9 buffer-local and allow various buffer-switching procedures to
10 do something sensible.
12 Here are the things that need to be implemented before
14 - [X] shift history out of node tree and into separate stack
15 - [ ] make history stack variables buffer-local
16 - [ ] have elpher-with-clean-buffer select appropriate buffer
18 ** OPEN Replace support for user-specified starting pages
19 This used to be available, but was removed during a refactor.
21 ** OPEN Allow for grouping of bookmarks
22 To support this I'd like to add a bookmark page specific
23 set of keybindings. Currently all bindings available on
24 the bookmark page are available everywhere else. But
25 expanding and collapsing bookmark groups sounds like it
26 might need more specific bindings.
28 ** OPEN Implement Gemini support [88%]
30 Here is the checklist of features required before release:
31 - [X] basic genimi transactions
32 - [ ] gemini transactions requiring client certificates
33 - [X] gemini input handling
34 - [X] gemini map files (text/gemini)
35 - [X] Support for plain text responses (text/*)
36 - [X] Support for image responses (text/image)
37 - [X] Support for mime-specified character encodeing
38 - [X] Saving responses to disk
39 - [X] Viewing raw responses
41 The last few will be made infinitely easier if we factor the
42 gopher "getter" code differently.
44 ** OPEN Add history browsing
48 ** History inconsistency when restarting elpher <2020-05-26 Tue>
51 1. open elpher and follow a few links until you're a handful of links below
53 2. kill the elpher buffer with C-x k
54 3. Open elpher again, which will show the start page.
55 4. Press 'u' to go up. Elpher wiill respond stating that there is no previous page.
56 5. Press 'u' again. Elpher will then jump to the page that was open when
57 the buffer was originally killed.
59 Expected behaviour: elpher should be once again at the bottom of the history
60 stack and should not remember the previous history.
62 Observed behaviour: elpher _does_ remember the previous history.
64 * Completed improvements
66 ** CLOSED Turn on lexical scoping
68 A branch exists for this, but there are some compilation kinks
72 ** CLOSED Implement support for telnet entries
74 Similar to http entries, telnet entries will be handled by code
75 external to elpher. However it seems I made http entry handling a
76 special case, and I don't want another! So the only option is to
77 bring both http and telnet entries back into the fold by representing
78 them both as standard nodes and having the grunt work done by getter
81 ** CLOSED Allow users to access selected and current node details.
83 ** CLOSED Implement bookmark system
85 Currently the bookmark page replaces the current page, and it
86 does so silently (i.e. it doesn't become part of the link hierarchy).
87 I think this is a mistake, as it results in confusing behaviour when
88 traversing the link hierarchy after visiting one of the bookmarked links.
90 Instead, I think I should
91 1. Make the bookmark page part of the hierarchy, and
92 2. Reinstate the visited node hash table to avoid excess link hierarchy pollution.
94 In order to accomplish 1. it will be necessary to make the bookmark page renderer
95 a proper getter function, and one that never caches the contents of the buffer.
97 Actually, I might have to think about that a bit more. I don't know
98 how to answer the question of what the best thing to do with node
99 parent links when using a cached node in place of a new node. (Maybe
100 I always update node.parent unless parent is already an ancestor of
104 ** CLOSED Support character encoding diversity
106 ** CLOSED Make URLs the basic address type.
107 Currently I waste a lot of effort converting between
108 URL and non-URL representations. This is unnecessary, and
109 actually makes lots of things uglier.
111 For example, the bookmarks file contains addresses in Elpher's
112 internal representation, whereas I expect users would prefer
115 So the idea would be for (elpher-node-address node) to be
116 a either a string or a symbol, with symbols used for "special"
117 pages (bookmarks, start page, etc). The getter functions
118 `elpher-address-selector' etc will still do what they currently
119 do, but will process the URL to do it.
121 This also means that non-gopher URLs will be explicitly represented
122 as such: no more abusing the "h" type for these.
124 ** INVALID Remove "redraw" command
125 This is only necessary for returning from displaying the raw
126 server response. If I can provide a better way of doing that
127 then we can get rid of redraw entirely.
129 Actually, this command can be useful to correct rendering issues that
130 occasionally pop up in termal windows. Lets leave it for now.
132 ** CLOSED Implement Finger support
134 ** CLOSED Improve download performance
135 This is actually easy to fix - the major problem at the moment is
136 the braindead way the incrementally-retrieved data is recorded:
137 (setq result-string (concat result-string next-bit)).
138 This is O(N^2). Yuck!
140 Okay, replacing this really does improve things. Large gemini
141 downloads now seem occur at rates I'd expect.
143 ** CLOSED Download/rendering progress feedback
144 Particularly for large files or complicated pages, elpher can
145 take a few seconds or more to generate a response. Thhis is
146 frustrating for users, who are left staring at a blinking
149 A small amount of feedback could help with this.
153 ** CLOSED Org mode faces are not present in recent emacs versions
154 Even 26.1 doesn't seem to have these. This means that, for many
155 users, elpher doesn't show any difference between any of the
156 item types. Not a major problem at all, but the faces we inherit
157 from should definitely be ones which have been present for much
158 longer. Perhaps the font lock mode faces are the way to go after
161 Update: changed all default faces to inherit from font-lock and basic faces.
163 ** CLOSED URL-centric addressing breaks bookmark file compatibility
165 Need a way to allow people to rescue their old bookmark files
166 following this update.
168 ** CLOSED History loops <2019-11-08 Fri>
170 Occasionally elpher gets stuck in a "history loop" where a
171 node is its own grandparent. Obviously this sucks, as history
172 is elpher's main mechanism for making gopherspace exploration
175 I suspect the problem is in either ~elpher-visit-node~ or
176 ~elpher-visit-parent~.
178 Follow-up: this has been fixed by the new stack-based history system
182 ** CLOSED Redirects do not rewrite current address
184 This is a bug, as gemini://blah.com/hi may get redirected
185 to gemini://blah.com/hi/, at which point link lines
186 of the form "=> there" should be interpreted as pointing
187 at gemini://blah.com/hi/there, while currently they are
188 interpreted as pointing at gemini://blah.com/there.