Conkeror Decoupling
Decoupling is an experimental branch of Conkeror that I have been working on since early 2010, and may be working on for some time to come before it is ready for general use. The main goals of the branch are to decouple buffers from windows, support window splitting, and introduce a more powerful command system. Because these goals entail extensive breaking changes to the program, I've elected to focus on this branch for adding new features to the program as well.
Obtaining
Conkeror-decoupling can be obtained from my git repository. Because of the instability of the branch, and the frequent need to rebase it against Conkeror master, I am only hosting it on my own site. I don't plan to push it to Conkeror's official repository until it is much more stable. If you check it out, make a new clone separate from your Conkeror master repo. There are enough differences that it will just give you headaches if you tried to maintain it as a branch.
Overall Status
The program should start, and browsing capabilities work at a rudimentary level.
Feature Status
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decoupling
Mechanics of decoupling are all in place, but need further debugging.
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window splitting
Low level plumbing for a layout and message sending system are in place but splitting itself is not yet implemented.
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define_command
This is the replacement for
interactive. It's beautiful. -
mouse support
Still pretty rudimentary.
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comprehensive dialog system
This is perhaps the biggest blocking issue right now. We need a coherent, robust system for handling dialogs of all types. Prompts that come up in the course of a key sequence are the easy case, and these are already fully supported. Prompts that come up from auxiliary events are the real trouble. We will need to allow dialogs to be backgrounded or deferred, both automatically, or by a key, and then commands, perhaps a new special-buffer type, to recall them. The key phrase here is non-intrusive dialog system.
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ibuffer
A basic buffer-list is implemented, and can be called up with
C-xC-b. Buffer management keys are not yet implemented. We might rename it. -
print preview
This is implemented, but there is an upstream bug in Mozilla where, if you switch away from a buffer in print preview mode, then switch back, the program segfaults. We will need to come up with a workaround for this, or fix the upstream bug.
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mode-line
Needs to be rewritten.
XULRunner Compatibility
Decoupling branch currently requires XULRunner 1.9.2 or higher. I have not ruled out the possibility of bumping up the requirement to 2.0 in order to be able to take advantage of the many new and cool features in the latest XULRunner. The main reason for the 1.9.2 minimum is that a new focus system was introduced in that version which makes focus handling much easier.