Gajim - 2025-01-04

Purplebored, ., Kris, ., Kris, Kris, Kris:

?

Hi

o7 thanks cal0 ✏

Debian nightly, just noticed that clicking on account no longer shows contacts for that account, they are shown under account advanced, manage contact list, has this changed or have I missed a setting somewhere.

titan: yes, this changed

Why is this condidered an improvement?

Because we dont need 3 different contact lists

Kris: treeview is deprecated as well

cal0pteryx, treeview?

erik: gtk's widget

lovetox: keeping the contact list account specific seems good though?

for what purpose?

Like if you have a private and a business account for example.

yes, thats why accounts have names that are shown everywhere

or what is the situation where you need to have a contact list filtered down to a specific account?

Yes, but why merge contact lists? Seems highly unintuitive and potentially misleading.

> or what is the situation where you need to have a contact list filtered down to a specific account? All the time. ↺

Like when would you *not* want it filtered like that?

i cannot say why i dont need something..

you need to tell me why you need something

what is the workflow where you think, hm i need all contacts shown in a list of a specific account?

I mean, if I wanted to have a single contact list, I would just use a single account, no?

> what is the workflow where you think, hm i need all contacts shown in a list of a specific account? I don't follow at all. Can you tell me a workflow where you would want them mixed together? ↺

as said, you need to tell me why you need something, i cannot tell you why i *dont* need something, thats like proving that something doesnt exist

I can't explain something that seems so obvious that it should need no explanation.

I mean, why do you use multiple accounts?

to separate concerns

Yes, such as contact lists, obviously.

no, i dont think about contact lists at all if i open a chat application

i think "i want to write peter", so i click Start Chat, and type "Peter"

then i start chatting

thats why i ask about your workflow, maybe you do it differently

That is exactly the footgun I mean and why I think it's better to keep them seperated.

Are we talking about the same things? Roster mgmt is account specific, it's in each account's submenu

Like I would not want to accedientially contact by business contact peter from my private account.

That's why there is an account badge on each contact in Start Chat

And if I look for a specific contact the best way to find it is by the account they are associated with.

Please not the difference between start chat and roster management

> And if I look for a specific contact the best way to find it is by the account they are associated with. you can do that, there is a filter at the top of start chat

cal0pteryx, no there is no account filter

Yes, but we are talking about the roster view that used to be visible when clicking on the account, no?

> Like I would not want to accedientially contact by business contact peter from my private account. how would that work? ↺

> cal0pteryx, no there is no account filter then we should have one

every contact has the account listed

do you actually use multiple accounts with Gajim?

Yes I do.

ok so click Start Chat

And I use the account seperated roster list a lot

and tell me how you could confuse contacts from different accounts

they have the name mentioned, and even a color

I don't use the start chat button a lot because it has very bad ux.

It mixes too many things together and becomes confusing quickly

Kris: please describe what's bugging you. Otherwise it can't be improved

its a list with names

as was the roster

whats confusing you?

An account filter should be sufficient then

If I want to start a 1:1 chat I click on my account and select the user from my roster list there.

i suspected that, thats very slow way to do something, and does not work if you have many contacts

And apparently that list was removed or hidden in some obscure submenu

> i suspected that, thats very slow way to do something, and does not work if you have many contacts ❓ ↺

What you should use is the dedicated dialog to start chats

If you tell us whats confusing about it, we can maybe improve it

> i suspected that, thats very slow way to do something, and does not work if you have many contacts That works a lot better than trying to wragle with that silly start chat search menu ✏ ↺

It mixes too many things together and you cant look at a list of contacts to find them.

What's silly exactly? I feel like your workflow is broken and you're afraid to adapt ;)

Search in general is a bad UX.

its a list, why can you not look at it?

Kris: you don't need to search, you can filter and the "search" with your eyes, just like before

What exactly is broken about having a list of contacts and selecting one?

its not broken, its just very slow and gets slower the more contacs you have

> Kris: you don't need to search, you can filter and the "search" with your eyes, just like before Unless you search it is too many things mixed together ↺

you said that now 3 times, but not whats mixed to gether

> its not broken, its just very slow and gets slower the more contacs you have I completely disagree, it is a lit faster and more intuitive. ✏ ↺

> its not broken, its just very slow and gets slower the more contacs you have I completely disagree, it is a lot faster and more intuitive. ✏ ↺

lovetox, cal0pteryx, I don’t know about this particular instance, but users often have extremely different ways of using software, even after years of using one they might still not find some very basic menus like start chat here.

We have to disagree then, as said, you will need to try using the start chat dialog, and tell us what we can improve

we will not maintain multiple ways to start a chat

> you said that now 3 times, but not whats mixed to gether It mixes contacts from different accounts and also chat channels. ↺

Link Mauve: that's why we migrated away from the roster _very_ slowly from 1.0 to 2.0

:)

Kris, the dialog has a filter menu, where you can filter the type of chat you search

of couse its simpler to just type a letter, and filter the list down

as i suspect you *know* the name of the person you want to chat with

Not necessarily, no.

yes and for these very few situations where you actually need to look through your whole contact list

you use the chat type filter, and then scroll your contact list

Some business aquintance that I sorted under the specific account might not have a name I can easily recall off my head.

until you find the person you need to

we can certainly add a account filter also if that helps

But why make it so complicated? ✏

i dont find a list with filters complicated

A lot more complicated than an account specific addressbook.

Two different lists make the situation complicated. Especially if one contains no groupchats (roster) and the other does (start chat)

As said from an application standpoint, we dont want to maintain 2 different ways and places to do the same thing

But I *want* contacts seperated from group chats. They are two completely different things. ✏

thats why you have a filter

Kris: you can do that by filtering in start chat

Filters are a very bad ux.

This is really going in circles, I think all has been said

i would suggest you try the start chat dialog, and after some time, you tell us what would make it better for you

or what you are missing

Ugh... i can understand that if you say its technically easier to program it that way, but it certainly does not improve the usability. ✏

lovetox: no, because the start chat diolog is mixing together too many things. I rather avoid using it.

It's not missing anything, it has too much already

then im very interested in how you are going to start a chat?

Click on the contact in my roster ✏

there is no roster anymore

It's not necessarily about programming two different things, but also from a user perspective it's bad UX to have two lists displaying some sort of contact list, which is not exactly the same, but to some degree it is

Yes and that seems bad, no?

you seem to think so

cal0pteryx: how is it bad ux to display things like they are? A contact is associated with an account in xmpp. Confusing that and mixing them together would be bad ux.

And 1:1 chats are not the same as group chats, and confusing them and mixing them together is also bad ux.

That's where our opinions differ ;) I think the old way is bad ux and the new way is better ux

I can understand that on mobile screens with limited screen-space you sometimes need to make compromises and dumb things down to a single button, but Gajim isn't a mobile app.

That has nothing to do with that

It seems very much the same argument

Let's describe it different: the old roster was not complete. The new start chat is complete

It was a nice way to logically compartmentualize contacts. They were complete in the logical sense that one contact from a specific account has little to do with another contact from a totally different account.

The commonality is the account

But group chats were missing, and that led to confusion.

That was bad ux

all im hearing is, "I am accustomed to start a chat via the roster list, and dont want to change it"

i am understanding, sometimes changing something is annoying

Yes, exactly, Kris workflow is broken, and hed'd like to keep it ✏

Lol, no I just don't want to change to something that is objectively worse UX on the desktop.

there is no way around it, if you want to use Gajim in the future you need to use the start chat dialog to start a chat

we are open to improving that dialog if you find useful things how to improve the process of starting a chat

But that diolog is the problem.

It is a bad idea to mix everything together.

yes, so use it, and then tell us what problems you run into

I have used it and found it bad ux.

> It is a bad idea to mix everything together. I think it's a good idea, and you can filter on top, which is great

mesonium, is the search field filled?

In the start chat dialog, I got an "Start New Chat" entry for each account, which do nothing when clicked on: that's a known leftover/bug? ✏

no, it's empty

then it does nothing

we could hide it in this case though

just opened the dialog and scrolled down. It appears in the list next to my contacts and chats.

when I filter the list by typing "foo" and click on it it says: DNS lookup failed: unknown POSIX error: enoname

these entries I find indeed confusing

What do you expect as error,? ✏

Start new chat should let me enter a JID right? ✏

no, it starts a new chat with "foo"

we could add a message above that tells you that we are unable to start a chat with foo, and show the technical error only on clicking details or something

you see, that's confusing :D I think it would work better to 1) put the Start New Chat eg on top or even outside of the list of contacts/channels as they are special actions and only work in combination with the search and 2) change the text to "Start New Chat with $search_entry". That would be clearer to me what it is supposed to do.

Major chat applications barely even single out the concept of a contact anymore. They center aroubd the concept of chat and display a single chat list. which includes one-on-one chats, group chats, and sometimes some other things like channels or secret chats, in the case of telegram, for example. This is what users expect now. This is what most xmpp clients do too. Moreover, it confuses people myself included to see even remnants of the contact centric approach. For example, when it turns out that you have to subscribe to a contact to be able to call them. "what the hell even is a subscription and why should I care?" is what the user thinks.

chud: those are all mobile first apps, not desktop apps.

That includes desktop programs too.

Ms teams, slack etc, don't do that

counter argument: those are bloated pieces of shit, hated universally by everybody.

Who uses these voluntarily? I think people only use them for work.

And all these mobile apps piggyback on you phone contact list.

I prefer to use desktop ux focussed apps on my desktop 🤷‍♂️

Piggyback as in search users by phone number, that's just not relevant for xmpp

> Piggyback as in search users by phone number, that's just not relevant for xmpp Also adding and removing contacts. ↺

which isn't something users even generally do anymore unless it is an actual phone number.

> Filters are a very bad ux. Instead of filters, how should in your opinion the UI look like, I'm curious :) because in the end you always filter in some means. ↺

> which isn't something users even generally do anymore unless it is an actual phone number. Many people use it to sync contacts via CardDAV etc. ✏ ↺

And filters are the main driver of UI today, I think. You can see search as a filter. Fast search-as-you-type completely obsoletes things like sub menus or contact groups. It's just so much faster to begin typing a person or program's name than to remember what group you put them into or what menu entry that program would logically belong to.

>> Filters are a very bad ux. > Instead of filters, how should in your opinion the UI look like, I'm curious :) because in the end you always filter in some means. Implicit filters like showing contacts in a list that are associated with an account. Asking people to manually filter things by arbitrary criteria is bad ux. ↺

A search centered UI is probably the worst ux that was invented in recent years, yes. I am happy that I don't have to use that on my desktop.

So you would be happy to have a combobox or a list of accounts on the left side, which you can select to show only appropiate chats?

Most people are happy about it. Also the desktop has long been dying

> So you would be happy to have a combobox or a list of accounts on the left side, which you can select to show only appropiate chats? No, I want to be able to sort and categorize things according to criteria that make sense to me. Which is exactly why I like Gajim because it allows to do so with workspaces and (at least previously) with accounts. ↺

> I want to be able to sort and categorize things according to criteria that make sense to me And how would that look like?

Kris: I've got a solution for you. You separate chats by account per workspace. That works by setting a default workspace per account. Chat's will be opened there by default. You can override that if you want. Then you can simply open the workspace and have your old workflow back

But the account button at the bottom is already such a workspace.

MS Teams has a contact list? I use that everyday at work, how would that contact list work with a company that has 50.000 employees?

> But the account button at the bottom is already such a workspace. No, not anymore.

>> But the account button at the bottom is already such a workspace. > No, not anymore. 👎 ↺

> MS Teams has a contact list? I use that everyday at work, how would that contact list work with a company that has 50.000 employees? Fine, but it has a dedicated space where you can find and list contacts. It's not mixed with the ux to start a group chat. ✏ ↺

> Fine, but it has a dedicated space where you can find and list contacts. It's not mixed with the ux to start a group chat. How does MS Teams work when you have multiple accounts? ↺

Afaik it doesn't support that at all.

then I don't think comparing Teams with Gajim for your situation makes much sense, because if you used Gajim with one account, you wouldn't be having this problem.

I know teams supports multiple accounts, but maybe only one at a time?

One at a time yes.

> then I don't think comparing Teams with Gajim for your situation makes much sense, because if you used Gajim with one account, you wouldn't be having this problem. No, that is unrelated ↺

Kris: at this point it's just whining. You've been presented alternatives for your workflow, and we explained the disadvantages of the old system. Now it's time to adapt

"My way or the highway" style of development 🙄

Too much Gnome influence I guess.

> "My way or the highway" style of development 🙄 That works the other way around as well :)

I didn't say you should remove your one button does all bondoggle.

I was just asking for a useful feature to not be removed.

And by that you're asking developers to waste extra time on a secondary (and bad) way of doing a single thing. That's the implication of "just not removing" a thing

> "My way or the highway" style of development 🙄 I mean you could just fork, it's not like Gajim is nearly as complex as the entirety of gnome. ↺

Well, if you would say due to technical reasons we decided to to reimplement a good feature, fine. But it isn't "bad" at all, just not the way you seem to use it.

Its exactly what people object about gnome. Removing features because a small group of designers doesn't like it, but without any good reasons. ✏

>> "My way or the highway" style of development 🙄 > I mean you could just fork, it's not like Gajim is nearly as complex as the entirety of gnome. 🙄 ↺

well, as a developer, I can relate to the idea that inconsistencies in the software lead to lots of questions in the long run and that every feature has a longterm cost of maintenance. I'm not a developer of Gajim, but in the open source software I develop (given away without charge), I'm not always willing to accept that cost. It's a balancing act, but I have removed features, even ones where there was no alternative, because of the cost (most of the time because of immediate cost of having to support the feature after refactoring the underlying code).

> Its exactly what people object about gnome. Removing features because a small group of designers doesn't like it, but without any good reasons. gnome is a huge project that no party other than redhat has the resources or enough incentive to affect. gajim is tiny by comparison ↺

erik, which software are you working on, btw?

chud, there are many more contributors to GNOME than Red Hat employees, fwiw.

Link Mauve, https://ledgersmb.org/ (https://github.com/ledgersmb/LedgerSMB) an accounting and ERP for small and medium businesses.

who?

During the very short time I was working for them, I basically interacted with no Red Hat employee.

erik, interesting, thanks!

I tried to convince the community to have a chat channel on XMPP, but Matrix was the big contender at the time. We're now on Matrix, unfortunately.

I'd love an XMPP<->Matrix bridge which allows me to move all my conversations to C and Gajim, instead of having to have other chat apps.

erik, aria-net.org is one such bridge, matrix.org is another, but I haven’t found them any pleasant to use years ago.

Plus if your Matrix side is encrypted, you will entirely miss all of the conversations, with no notice that you are missing stuff out.

yea. the matrix conversations in the channels isn't encrypted: it's a FOSS community, which can be joined by anybody. So, it doesn't make sense to encrypt.

erik: it's possible to do with Slidge ✏

Even works with encrypted matrix chats, but not true e2ee in that case obviously.

What does "enable hats" in MUC config mean?

https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0317.html

ok. thanks. that's not the setting I'm looking for :-)

in a 4-participant MUC, Conversations shows me 1 of the participants (other than myself) has read a message. I'm not seeing the same read-indicator in Gajim. Can I enable this in Gajim? And if I can, where? (I see "send chat marker", but not "show chat marker")

Hello, I've recently migrated my prosody server to another host, and since then I have a weird bug with Gajim. One of my channels (a private channel I've created), is perpetually loading. I usually can still send and receive messages but I've noticed that some times it seems I don't receive them. This is a problem that only occurs on Gajim, but not on Dino or Conversations. I've already tried removing the account from gajim and adding it back but it didn't work. And I don't see anything weird in the Gajim debug console either :/

Do you have any idea on why a channel would be always in the state of "fetching new messages" ?

*"fetching messages...3

> Hello, I've recently migrated my prosody server to another host, and since then I have a weird bug with Gajim. One of my channels (a private channel I've created), is perpetually loading. I usually can still send and receive messages but I've noticed that some times it seems I don't receive them. This is a problem that only occurs on Gajim, but not on Dino or Conversations. I've already tried removing the account from gajim and adding it back but it didn't work. And I don't see anything weird in the Gajim debug console either :/ I have the same with the ejabberd support channel. ↺

All other channels work fine.

It is a complete mystery to me why this happens though 🤷‍♂️

Oh 🤔 That's really weird

enable debug logging, wait for the problem to happen

send me the debug log

fetching messages means we never finish the request messages process on join

this can be a bug in Gajim, or it can be a bug on the server side, never sending us the "complete" signal

Alright, i just upgraded Prosody to the trunk (beta) version and it seems to work find now.

So I guess it was indeed a server-side isssue

UI suggestion: when I am searching for messages, the column opens on right side, but then I cannot see the menu to correct last message. It is better that menu still appears there.

Hi, is there a setting in gajim to prefer ipv6 over v4 when connecting to the server? (want to test connectivity to server)

> Hi, is there a setting in gajim to prefer ipv6 over v4 when connecting to the server? (want to test connectivity to server) I don't know about gajim settings, but you might be able to test that by changing your OS's settings. For instance on Linux you can simply disable the IPv4 configuration all together (that way forcing the usage of ipv6 everywhere) ✏ ↺

bronko: no

Thanks, will try the suggestio from @snowcode. Lets see how far v6 adoption is 🤞️

Or you disable ipv4 on the server shortly ✏

Depends how many connected users you have

Yeah i think many users will not like that

most mobile clients still connect with v4

though it should work without problem or?

i mean this is a destaster test

but if your provider has problems with ipv4, then users should automatically swiched to ipv6

gajim seems to randomly use v4 or v6 on connect

but it works both ways so i guess the server is configured properly

thats normal, every network lib does this

its called happy eyeballs, it tries both at the same time, the first one that answers is taken

because many network libs do this, you could also simply monitor your ipv6 connections

after some time, there should be some

good to know, thanks 👍️

What does the option "Default users as participants" entail?

Is that for moderated MUCs? That they can partake in the discussion right away?

You need to ask in server support

These are server options, Gajim just allows you to set them