Climacs, a modern version of the Emacs editor

Motivation

GNU Emacs is an excellent text editor, but was designed more than 20 years ago now, and the technical choices of the time create some problems today. :

Emacs Lisp is a language that was specially designed in order to implement Emacs. Since the design of GNU Emacs and of Emacs Lisp, Common Lisp has been standardized, and gives both better performance than that of Emacs Lisp (because Emacs Lisp is implemented as an interpreter written in C) and more sophisticated functionalities (macros, CLOS, etc). The natural choice for implementing Emacs today is thus Common Lisp.
GNU Emacs was designed before the existence of the Unicode standard. Unfortunately, the internal representation of a buffer does not allow the representation of all Unicode characters in a compact way. An internal representation allowing both all of Unicode and a compact representation for the ISO-latin-1 subset is desirable.
Twenty years ago, graphic user interfaces practically did not exist. GNU Emacs was designed for a text-only terminal. Today better modes of interaction exist. In particular, with CLIM (Common LIsp Interface Manager) it is both possible and desirable to have an interface based on the concept of "presentation types".
Because of the limited power of computers at the time, GNU Emacs uses a certain number of approximations in order to analyze the contents of a buffer, in particular when that contents is the text of a program. These approximations are no longer necessary, and with current technology, it is possible to maintain a complete syntactic analysis of the buffer text.

Suggested projects

The ultimate goal of the project being the replacement of GNU Emacs with a modern version written entirely in Common Lisp, we propose a certain number of student projects around this project, the preliminary name of which is "Climacs" :

Here is a list of the suggested projects :

Useful links: