Re: What is the most useful potential feature which Emacs lacks?

[Helmut Eller <eller.helmut@gmail.com>]

On Mon, May 11 2020, ndame wrote:

> There is a discussion on Reddit about sponsoring development of
> multithreading in Emacs, and people there say it's too hard, takes a
> lot of time and it doesn't even bring that much benefit to the user.
>
> If this is the case (is it?) then what are those other features which
> could bring much more tangible benefits for the user and assuming
> somebody works on them full time sponsored by the community they can
> be implemented in, say,  a few months?

1. Improving display of long lines.  Emacs gets very unresponsive when a
buffer contains long lines.  This is something I run into rather
frequently and it's very irritating.  Apparently this is a difficult
problem to fix because to the display code needs to "measure" how long
the line is in pixels and there is no other way to that than to iterate
over each character in a line.  But it may be possible reduce the number
of how often this measuring needs to done.  It seems to me that
web-browsers also need a long time to display long lines, but once the
line is drawn, scrolling works as quick as for short lines.

2. Being able to display HTML/CSS/SVG the way mainstream web-browsers
display would be nice.  But probably too big a project.  And in the long
run, probably a reason for Emacs to go extinct.

Helmut