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From: Mekeor Melire <mekeor@posteo.de>
Newsgroups: comp.emacs
Subject: Emacs-related ideas for CS master thesis?
Date: Wed, 04 Feb 2026 10:27:48 +0100
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Dear fellas,

I study computer science in masters and next semester I'll do a
master thesis. I really like Emacs, so I was wondering if I could
do a an Emacs-related project. Do you have any ideas?

One idea I have is to port Emacs to Qt. Note that the project
itself wouldn't aim to merge this feature into Emacs core. Such
discussions on emacs-devel could take place outside my
university-logic, after my thesis. I'm not sure how much work such
a pure-Qt port (similar to pure-GTK) would need though. Similarly,
it could be a project to port Emacs to GTK4. Or to offer users to
build Emacs without Cairo, but with another graphics library. I
recently saw someone use a code-focused LLM to replace Cairo with
Skia [1], for example.

Another idea is to implement a website and accompanying web
services for people to check if their email-clients correctly
implement RFC 3676 (which obsoletes RFC 2646) known as
“format=flowed” or F=F. Based on this application, I could then
fix F=F implementations of Emacs-based MUAs like Gnus, RMail,
Notmuch.el and/or Mu4e. [2]

Another idea could be to use the new, experimental Canvas API that
is currently being developed by Daniel Mendler (minad) on
emacs-devel [3], to implement new features. Perhaps performant
indentation lines? Perhaps Emacs as video player and editor?
Perhaps Emacs as image editor? Or a game?

I'd be happy to hear your thoughts on these and other ideas,
e.g. with regard to difficulty and realizability.

Kind regards,
Mekeor

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/1qitl8s/experimental_skia_rendering_backend_as_cairo/

[2] I've started this kind of work for Gnus but I'm stuck: https://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/bugreport.cgi?bug=78519

[3] https://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/bugreport.cgi?bug=80281