What improvements would be truly useful?

From: Richard Stallman Subject: What improvements would be truly useful? Date: Mon, 05 Mar 2018 08:11:38 -0500

[[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider ]]] [[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies, ]]] [[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]] An improvement in GC wouldn't be a bad thing, but it may not be worth the effort. It is likely to lead to many bugs that would be hard to fix. Once working, it would not make much difference to users. It would only permit some operations on larger problems than now. When I was working at the AI Lab, one of the older programmers told me that hackers are often eager to make improvements of this sort: which make the program better in an abstract sense, but not better for users. I took that advice to heart. Now I pass it on. Changing Emacs to handle indentation and alignment with variable-width fonts would be an important and useful change. Certain kinds of use would make sense, which currently don't. It would be a big step towards making Emacs do the job of a word processor, which is what I would like to see some day. Imagine if you could edit nicely formatted documents directly with Emacs, instead of using LibreOffice? LibreOffice is fine to use, it is free software, but it isn't Emacs. -- Dr Richard Stallman President, Free Software Foundation (https://gnu.org, https://fsf.org) Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org) Skype: No way! See https://stallman.org/skype.html.