Gajim - 2023-07-28

Please correct me if I'm wrong, I figure, the only way to see a contact's status message is to hover on the contact in the roster of an AccountPage.

Veronica (XMPP): don't deactivate use system keyring

I think I Just found out an unusual behaviour. When I remove a contact from a roster, it doesn't show up on the roster anymore (as expected) but the number in the [Contacts n/n] label above the roster doesn't change.

When I had 3 contacts, it was Contacts (3/3). But after removing one of the contacts, it still shows Contacts (3/3).

And the client of the removed contact shows that only the authorization was removed. And my account still appears in the contact list of the removed contact's client.

But with my account's status set to Offline.

My account and the removed contact still can send/receive messages.

Should I make an issue?

Then I added the contact back again and added authorization and all that.

I went to the contact's client (in this case, Psi+). From there I removed my account from the contact list of my contact.

And I was surprised to see that the my contact still shows up in the contact list of my account in Gajim.

But my account didn't show up anymore in my contact's roster in Psi+

kurion: you can't force others to remove yourself from their contact list

Only thing you can do is remove subscription. Then they'll stop seeing your online status

If you want to block someone, you can do that additionally to removing them from your contact list

Oh, I see. I was wrong to have thought this removing contact was a both way thing. ✏

thanks for the clarification.

What about the Contacts (n/n) label not changing after I remove a contact from my roster?

kurion: on gajim 1.8.0?

yes.

That seems to be a bug

I made some changes here and there but not anything related to the roster treeview except the Menu button thing.

Just open an issue, I'll check later :)

Will do

Just wanted a quick yes/no. Does changing that Contacts label involve requesting something from the XMPP server or using the nbxmpp module? ✏

Your contact names are synchronized with the server

I see.

Another UX improvement I wanted to draw attention to: To set/change a contact's nickname one has to 1. go to the his accounts AccountPage 2. go to the contact's Details page through the roster context menu 3. click on Settings tab there. 4. click the pencil icon to edit the nickname.

I think we could make it easier on the user to change nicks of his contacts. Because people choose all sorts of peculiar jids and giving them a easy to recognize nick is a feature that many people need to make heavy use of. ✏

What do you guys think?

Like if we could press F2 (which is a common renamer key on file explorer applications) on a contact in the roster to edit its nick in place, it'd be great. ✏

Or at least provide a context menu for changing the nick.

kurion: in each chat, there is an info button at the top. This leads you directly to the contact's details dialog

kurion: we don't want to move more functionality to the roster. We already hide it from the standard view

Other messengers don't have a way at all to look at the roster

All actions should be available from the chat view

And renaming contacts is not as common as you think

As people can set their own nickname which they usually do

dont call me babe.

>Other messengers don't have a way at all to look at the roster 2020s really took instant messaging by storm >.>

Rosters are mainly useful for presence and presence is part of the acronym of XMPP. Ironically, despite that, other messengers tend to do it better.

Discord has its 'Rich Presence' with interactivity. And Steam has its focused gaming presence which is useful for watching or joining games.

focused gaming presence, how does it work?

I don't use steam

steam is spyware

btw Deide, you can set custom status messages on xmpp

As in you can see what games your friends are playing - to varying details. ie. "Ben is attacking a horde of goblins in Goblin Hunter level 2"

you can script it to set that to whatever program has focus if you wanted to

Yes you can.

shouldn't be too difficult I think

But if the Roster is more and more hidden away, it's information you're only likely to see during an active conversation. My point was that the messengers that do still have prominent rosters mainly do so for the sake of presence.

it's not hidden away tho is it

> we don't want to move more functionality to the roster. We already hide it from the standard view > Other messengers don't have a way at all to look at the roster Sorry, I'm mainly replying to this

I see

we show presence in the conversation list

and we could show the status message simply in the chat banner

but its simply not used often, you cant compare it to steam, steam does this automatically, and it can display funny or useful things

as a xmpp client, i can show if you are away when you set a auto away message

but thats about it, i think people would not find it *nice* if a xmpp client begins to monitors every action and broadcasts it to the world

User X is looking at pornhub.com

if I'm not wrong, the only way to see the contact's status message is to hover over it in the roster, right? ✏

> but thats about it, i think people would not find it *nice* if a xmpp client begins to monitors every action and broadcasts it to the world that's true, even having the feature would be seen badly in free software communities

it's a 'sus' feature

A list containing all the contacts, icon to show if they are online/offline/away, their current status message is what would be a great roster in my opinion

it can be cool if you script it yourself tho

What do you guys think of the roster in Psi+ ?

lovetox: a cool way to do this would be to allow you to set your status to update based on the output of some shell command

maybe make automation/scripting a little easier

kurion, we are discussing the need for a roster

yeah if you want to do a roster, psi+ is certainly great

but we dont want to need a roster

and i know only one reason someone needs roster

> and it can display funny or useful things Yeah, exactly! Useful presence is nice. I'd just think that the Messaging and _Presence_ Protocol might be geared towards that.

and thats a business usecase, where you want a look who from a certain group is online

> if I'm not wrong, the only way to see the contact's status message is to hover over it in the roster, right? if that is so then it's not great

> and thats a business usecase, where you want a look who from a certain group is online or maybe you have many friends on xmpp and want to check who is available for a chat..?

this is not common sorry

yeah, unfortunately

xmpp isn't very popular

in privat env, you know exactly who you want to talk to

As uncommon as xmpp to be sure

not looking in a list of 10 people, and then deciding based on status who you write

in todays times, you write your message anyway

the status does not matter

> in privat env, you know exactly who you want to talk to not sure what you mean by a private env

> in todays times, you write your message anyway personally I think that's not good

why would it not be good?

and I dislike how popular messaging apps hide presence these days

why would i care what status you have, if i want to send you a message

thats what messengers are for

on whatsapp, I don't want to message someone if they are busy

why not?

or just not available

because I want to talk with them now

that's what presence is for

if I'm green bubble, I'm available for a chat

if it's red, then that means I'm busy

!? you write only people if you believe you get an immediate answer?

no, because modern chat apps forced me to just DM them whenever

and even if the status is green, that does not mean at all that you get an answer

it has simply nothing to do with it

only because im green, does not mean i want to talk to you

on the MSN days, DMing someone who had the red status was just not polite tho

I can see that being the case if you have a selection of people to choose from. Maybe you want to have a conversation for 10 - 20 minutes instead of having something very particular and asynchronous to relay.

I only started using xmpp recently, but I did use old messengers where presence was a big thing

its irrelevant, a client that is set to busy, will not notify you about new messages

thats what busy means

dont notify me, i have other things to do

so i couldnt care less if 100 people message me while im busy

Why broadcast the status at all then?

i will not notice it anyway

if I'm talking to friends, I would rather talk to them when they are already "available" beecause it's more likely for them to be available

even if it's not 100%

ofc they could have just forgotten

status i nice, to know if someone is available, or busy (not likely he will answer), or offline

but back in my day we would set it to busy/away when going afk

im not arguing that we dont need status, im arguing you dont need a list of 100 people visible to see all of there status

you want to talk to someone, you open a chat

see the status and make your conclusion

> im not arguing that we dont need status, im arguing you dont need a list of 100 people visible to see all of there status it's more relevant if you have a lot of people you talk to on xmpp

sometimes I just want to talk to anyone about random crap

and I don't want to bother them if they are busy

like, sure it's not "needed" but it's easier to have a list

There is an online status called “free for chat” in standard.

How about we can see the status message of contacts along with already available info in the Start/Join Chat dialog?

I think the current contacts list is fine tho

I mean the status message is useful piece of info. Why put it in a place that is purposefully hidden (kind of)? ✏

> I mean the status message is useful piece of info. Why put it in a place that is purposefully hidden (kind of)? yeah, I see no reason to hide it personally

not that it's a big deal

just so you dont misunderstand me, i see no problem with status, or status message, all useful no discussion

But you think the perfect place for this info is the roster

and thats what im trying to tell you, the roster will not be a central part of the UX of Gajim

it will always be there, but always hidden, under one or two clicks

so if you really find this information so useful, think about placing it somewhere where people see it easily and dont need to go to the roster

Is Start/Join Chat a good place for this?

status is already there, of course we can display the status message also

where do other messengers place this info?

Psi+ has it in the roster

> it will always be there, but always hidden, under one or two clicks this is fine

roster is a central part of UX in Psi+ ✏

would be nice to have a CLI argument to start gajim at the roster/contacts list page tho

for convenience

yes, Psi+ is a 90 style chat client, it makes no sense to look at them for UX

btw I just realized that you can toggle the chat list. Pretty cool feature.

for example we display the status message in the group chat roster

look here in the Gajim chat

10 people from 200 have a status message set

and its the automatic one that Gajim sets when you are not available

status message is more important in the business setting

where you communicate holidays, or who to contact in case of emergency or something like that

Just to be clear, I am not saying that we should take UX lessons from Psi+.

But apart from their inbox UI, do you think the concept of having the roster as a central part of UX is a 90s only thing?

is there a way to hide the workspace bar in gajim?

Design of every messenger is opinionated, not going to battle that.

kurion, yes

there is no messenger in the last 10 years that features a roster as main point of the ux to my knowledge

I think it would be nice if options to hide both the workspace and chat list bars were available from the menu bar under "View" ✏

the "view" menu currently only has two options

btw is it okay to make these feature requests here? I don't want to be inconvenient

Could there be some kind of poll at gajim.org to survey how users are liking the new layout?

or what parts of the old and new layout they like or find useful.

i rather have a poll about what features users want to see

That would be nice too.

aquatarkus, yes this room is for discussing Gajim

I think it will be very interesting to see the results of the layout vs layout poll as no layout is likely to have a landslide victory.

there is no reason to do such a poll, because there is no action for us that follows it

a user that loves 90 style chat messengers, has multiple options he can use

at least the _mega_ contact list and the multi window layout was very useful, imo

everything is useful to someone

this issue is an interesting read https://dev.gajim.org/gajim/gajim/-/issues/11531

i love proprietary software

alright, another small suggestion that I would have is to replace the "Gajim" menu bar entry with "Main" or something along these lines

because Gajim is already the window menu/title of the program. It looks weird to have a menu bar entry that is the same title of the window, at least in my opinion

> this issue is an interesting read > https://dev.gajim.org/gajim/gajim/-/issues/11531 I share their opinion on 1). I like to make the Gajim window very small to chat with friends when I'm party watching a show with them

I think being able to hide parts of the UI like the workspace view would help with this

I have a 1366x768 resolution

https://share.hoerist.com/philipp/2MlK35JVSe5R6jG4/51777cfc-8802-49f7-805e-9bd6d5354035.png

looks small enough for me

but that depends on your screen size

this is the smallest that I can make it

and yes if you have low resolution, everything will be bigger

https://sure.im:443/upload/08366416-aca1-4e08-a4a3-5655ffc4dcf2/b0bcec07-d50a-4e5a-91de-bf39bc22ad4f.png

if I were to make it smaller, stuff would start to be cut

now after I opened and closed a window, stuff started cutting earlier

https://sure.im:443/upload/220c3011-85c1-4613-acdb-8b98f8ae5309/20c5cd03-cce6-4f87-9efd-b740d71272f0.png

so what about some kind of single chat focus mode

that removes the banner, and the left sidebar

so it would only display the chat text anymore

yeah, that would be great

but just the ability to hide the workspace bar would be good already

sounds to complex to me

one shortcut to hide the conv list

a second one to hide the bar

its obvious that you dont want to use the application constantly in this state

yeah

so why not find out what it is that you actually want, and provide one shortcut who gets you there

i can understand the use case, to chat only with one person and want to have the window small to do something on the side

lets call it "Focus Mode"

I think being able to hide the workspace bar has another usecase tho, some people barely use the workspaces feature. I like it personally, but some additional customization settings can't hurt unless they are harder to implement I think.

It would be also nice if you could switch to the Roster page and the main status page with the "View" menu from the menu bar

not using workspaces is no reason to hide them, you dont need to click there

and disabling workspaces does not allow to remove the sidebar

as it has multiple other uses

i think if people say "i dont use workspaces" they mean, make the sidebar go away

> as it has multiple other uses yeah, you can switch to the status and roster pages

but there is the profile button on the left bottom side, and the Gajim button at the top

aside from workspaces, these are the two other functionalities of it

and both have uses

I think these could be added to the view menu tho

so that people can choose to not use the sidebar

hm both can also show notifications

and we need a place where we can notify the user about non-chat related stuff

> and we need a place where we can notify the user about non-chat related stuff like what? I'm new to XMPP, never saw notifications there

We could try and move the buttons into the cat list

when someone sends you a groupchat invitation, or want to add you to his roster for example

in the future we might warn the users with notification there, that something does not work on his server

where can I find an example screenshot? I never got either

tell someone to send you a groupchat invite

can someone send me a groupchat invite? I don't have any friends online

:x

but you need a roster for your many friends right :D

once I convert everyone to XMPP, that is

it's no easy task

i send you an invite

thanks, I see it

kurion, i just remembered if your chat switching is slow, what also helps is closing the groupchat roster

it increases performance very much

Thanks. But I barely have a groupchat.

lovetox: I think workspace switching could also be added to the view menu. View -> Workspaces... -> (list)

no because the workspace shows notifications

how many unreadmessages you have, how would you even know that there are messages waiting

true

if someone wants to use workspaces, the bar needs to be there

if not the problem is the profile button and the app button

i can see getting rid of the app page altogether

and maybe we can move the profile button into the chat list bottom

I am loving the workspaces

EmleyMoor, great to hear :)

the app page is mainly useful to check for plugin/gajim updates, maybe move this to the about page?

Help -> About

it can set currently a status for *all* accounts

Global status is quite useful

> it can set currently a status for *all* accounts true, I missed that because I only have one account

It is my earnest request to the devs to consider putting up a user survey to see what features the Gajim userbase want. But I think ensuring organic response might be hard.

kurion, we are talking about making Gajim able to be smaller

this is a very often requested topic

its not that we dont want to do it, but its not that easy, a lot of things have to be solved

Yes, definitely

another thing to consider in regards to notifications is that most people have system notifications

in windows, a (1) would display in the taskbar icon when you have unread chats or other notifications, wouldn't it?

or it would show up on the tray

also lovetox, would it really be impossible to display notifications in the menu bar? I vaguely remember some program where they displayed a status directly on the menu bar

notifications in the menu bar? never seen that in any application

no system notifications is just to make you notice something

but the same thing needs to be visible in gajim also

just think we would only send system notifications

but would not show you in Gajim which chat has unread messages

because we already told you with a notification

Especially in Linux env you can not assume people have installed demons that can persist notifications

> notifications in the menu bar? never seen that in any application I'm thinking more about dynamically changing menu entries. I have seen a FPS counter before for instance

You could display workspace unread chat notifications in the menu bar along with the name of the chat

View -> Workspaces... -> [3] Groups / [2] People Like this

the [number] would indicate the amount of unread messages per workspace

the downside is that it's not on your face (for a notification, it's a downside I guess), but I think it would still serve the intended purpose of letting you know that you have unread messages

as said you focus on the wrong thing

making the workspace icon disappear does not make the sidebar disappear

i doubt that someone who actively uses workspaces, has a big problem with the sidebar

i assume its only the people that have no use for it, want it gone ✏

the harder question is, where the other functionalities of the sidebar should move

I'm suggesting this under the assumption that you would want to move the profile icon to the chat bar in order to make the workspace bar toggleable

if you can toggle it, why would we move stuff to a menu?

then you simply can toggle it if you are interested in the information or need to use it

because then you can access that stuff even when you toggle the bar off

and people can choose the UI that they prefer

whether it's the bar or accessing it via the menu bar

doing it via the menu bar saves up on space

and how do you select a chat after switching to the workspace?

how do you see which chat has notifications?

via the chat bar

the chat list

that makes no sense, either you want the window small then everything is hidden

or not then it does not matter if there are 40 px sidebar

nobody uses a menu to save 40 px on the screen

depends

if I only use gajim maximized then I wouldn't

but if I wanted it open while I'm doing other stuff, then I would want to reduce the size of unnecessary stuff as much as I can

its not unnecessary

the chat list is necessary, workspace bar isn't

you actively use it and need the information

meh i dont see it really, we are not in a game to save every pixel

i can understand someone that says i want a very small window and chat to a single person, i dont need all the other information for a amout of time

i cant emphasize with the argument, i need Gajim to be 40px smaller

it depends on I'm doing and how much space is required for other activities

for the previous example, in party watching I would want it as small as possible

but if I wanted to have LibreOffice Writer or Emacs open while I do work and have a chat on the side, then I wouldn't mind some additional clutter on the side, I wouldn't need it to be that small but a full-sized gajim window is still too big

but yeah it's minor, if you could just add 'focus mode' that would already be very awesome

> I wouldn't need it to be that small but a full-sized gajim window is still too big just to complete, I think the chat list is way more important than the workspace bar for the general usability of the client

would also be nice if it could be shrank further than it is currently possible, in a way that the message preview would be hidden, and only the avatar and the number of unreads would be displayed

(this is again very minor)

yes this would possible i guess if we do notification badges as overlay over the avatar

https://share.hoerist.com/philipp/vc6O5kT1nqaDup5k/Screenshot_from_2023-07-28_22-24-48.png

like this maybe

perfect

also lovetox, would it be possible to allow further shrinking of the window before UI elements start to get cut off?

yeah we have to look into it, its not intentional, i dont know what is causing this, i think somewhere is a minimal size defined

thank you :)

i added a feature request for the focus mode, and if we work on that then its logical to look into the min size stuff also

https://dev.gajim.org/gajim/gajim/-/issues/11587

Hello. Is there some kind of auto-complete in Gajim. I cannot type "op" without Gajim changing it to "original poster". How could I turn this off? (Manjaro Linux, Gajim 1.8.0.) Thanks.

might be gspell/hunspell doing that? i dont recall any such autoreplace in gajim itself

but also i dont have any *spell packages on my system cus i dont use spellcheck at all