323166 - [META] Missing text-editing features and functionality

Status: REOPENED

(Core :: DOM: Editor, enhancement)

Description

[Eyal Rozenberg]

I'm opening this meta bug to track bugs about features missing from the mozilla text editor component and are necessary or useful to have. Most of these, in my opinion, do not belong in extensions, mainly because the editor has to have foundational support for enabling such extensions, which it hasn't.

Comment 1

[Eyal Rozenberg]

In addition to the dependent feature requests, I would like to see any or all of the following:

01. syntax highlighting
02. parenthesis matching
03. auto-indentation
04. tab-to-space conversion and the other way around
05. display of non-printing characters using numeric codes and/or some graphic (similar to what is done for emoticons)
06. multi-threadedness for tasks such as passes of spelling, regexp matching etc.
07. a wrap/nowrap toolbar button 
08. dynamic setting of the wrap margin (draggable ruler perhaps)
09. trailing line space removal option
10. whole-line selection like in MS-Word if you click outside the horizontal text margins.
11. display of the current line and char number in the status bar
12. word, char, line counts
13. goto line/paragraph
14. running line numbers display 
15. ability to draw diagrams, then have them converted to 'text graphics' (this would rock! I often want to draw tables in e-mail, and _not_ use HTML, thank you)
16. integration with external text editor component (i.e. not an external app but a loadable widget - I'm pretty sure there's a way to do this with KDE, Windows, etc.)
17. ability to save and load a message as a plain text file
18. ability to change character encoding of the current selection instead of the whole message

Some of these may need to be extensions, some of these not. Anyway, there should be backend support to enable all of the above.

Comment 2

[Eyal Rozenberg]

19. regular expressions for find and replace

haven't found a bug about this specifically, although there are bug 19442 and bug 273046

20. quote folding (a-la code folding for functions; maybe that too...)
21. statusbar display of unicode value of char at cursor
22. text sort
23. text justify with spaces (left/center/right=wrap margin)
24. possibility to integrate HTML Tidy, lint, and other such tools

Comment 3

[Eyal Rozenberg]

The rectangular/column selection bug is especially relevant to text editing.

Comment 4

[Eyal Rozenberg]

By 'text editor' I mean anything implementing 

/editor/idl/nsIPlaintextEditor.idl

which in practical terms means the plaintext composer window.

Comment 5

[Eyal Rozenberg]

Another feature:

25. Increase/decrease quote depth level, i.e. switch from 

> > text

to 

> text

or 

> > > text

Comment 6

[Eyal Rozenberg]

26. cut out all quote lines which only contain spaces (see bug 347325)

Comment 7

[Ioana (away)]

I see no specific request associated to the qawanted keyword here. Is there anything you need from QA for this bug?

Comment 8

[(no longer active)]

No, and in fact this bug is not useful.

Comment 9

[Eyal Rozenberg]

Ehsan, this is a tracking + kitchen-sink-list META bug. How is it not useful/INCOMPLETE? Note specifically that multiple outstanding bugs block it. Please consider reopening it.

Comment 10

[(no longer active)]

Sure, but I'm not sure if we're ever going to fix most if not all of these blocker bugs, at least for Firefox.  The status of this bug doesn't have an impact on that though I guess.  :-)

Comment 11

[Jens Stutte [:jstutte]]

Bulk-downgrade of unassigned, >=3 years untouched DOM/Storage bug's priority.

If you have reason to believe this is wrong, please write a comment and ni :jstutte.

Comment 12

[Eyal Rozenberg]

:jstutte : This is a meta bug, tracking multiple bugs regarding specific features (and some missing features with no individual bugs). Many of these features are not trivial or minor - especially in the context of Thunderbird. But I'll rephrase the title.