NeoChat in KDEReview

Sun Nov 22 20:16:53 GMT 2020

Thanks Carl for chasing Albert's comments so quickly. Here's my review 
comments on neochat 5316e32004fcfa60d72f373e2e55b44b8fecf2c7 (master HEAD as 
of right now).

On Sunday, 22 November 2020 12:40:16 CET Carl Schwan wrote:
> Le samedi, novembre 21, 2020 1:26 AM, Albert Astals Cid <aacid at kde.org> a 
écrit :
> > El dijous, 19 de novembre de 2020, a les 23:27:24 CET, Carl Schwan va 
escriure:
> > > Tobias and I have been working on a Matrix client using Kirigami,
> > > named NeoChat. NeoChat is still missing a few features to become

I'm going to admit that I'm using KDE Frameworks 5.75, rather than 5.76. For 
Kirigami, where application use is now strongly steering development and 
bugfixing, that might be a terrible choice. I've been told at least some bugs 
are fixed in 5.76 already.

That said:

-1. Uses the Spectral icon in the About page and in the systray (only 
confusing if Spectral is also around, and depending on your relationship with 
Spectral, might be kind of rude).

0. Emoji fonts continue to be an issue (a packaging issue, I'm sure -- noto 
emoji and noto-extra or equivalents seem to be needed) .

1. Alongside the "write your message" there are three buttons. None of them 
have tooltips. There's a smiley (for emoji), a paperclip (for attachments) and 
a lemon juicer. Is there ever, ever, any reason to click the lemon juicer?

2. Clicking on the emoji button gets me an emoji picker -- with no tooltips, 
and no way to get back to writing a text message. (I suspect this is 
frameworks-version dependent, since the text block is also way too tall)

3. In the upper-right of the chat pane, there's a round (it was square-ish 
yesterday) button with an up-chevron in it. No tooltip. Clicking on it does 
nothing (I get an error message on stdout: searching for non-existent event .. 
which makes me think this goes back in history looking for mentions). It'd be 
nice to have it disabled when there's nothing it can do.

4. There's no way to resize or hide the list of channels. Most of the time 
that's the least interesting thing on screen -- I just need a channel avatar 
and number of messages, not the full description of each channel.

5. The show-room-members pane doesn't have a tooltip, and doesn't highlight 
like a button does (like the emoji button).

Usage scenarios:

6. Click on the text-field for writing messages. Type "derp". Notice flashing 
text cursor in text-field. Click on the room-list. Text-cursor disappears from 
text-field. Type something: this doesn't appear *anywhere*. It doesn't search 
or filter the room list, nor does it go to the regular text input.

Since there's a "search" field for rooms, I expect that typing things into 
neochat goes to the-message-to-be-sent **except** if something explicitly 
different is chosen. Quasselclient does this: click on the chats list and 
start typing, and it re-sets focus to the message box.

7. RMB "mark as read" on a room to clear the unread-messages-count is kind of 
unintuitive. Especially since scrolling all the way up in the chat list, and 
then all the way down, doesn't clear it either. It feels like a "you must 
acknowledge these" kind of thing.

8. Clicking on the rooms-list pane makes the topmost-right button -- the show-
room-members-pane button -- disappear. It reappears if you click on the 
message text-field.

9. If I go to the hamburger-menu, and pick accounts, there's a list of 
accounts (just one). I tried to add one of my other accounts -- 
opendesktop.org -- which doesn't work: I get a red message immediately that 
that thing is not a Matrix server. I know it is, because my Quaternion-based 
chatbot is on it :S This is an improvement on yesterday, though, when I got no 
error message (or it took so long I didn't notice anymore).

10. So if I decide I don't want to login after all, there's no obvious cancel 
button. The hamburger menu doesn't take me back to chat-mode. The only way to 
get back to chatting is to click the "back" arrow between the burger and the 
current-page-title until I get there. This starts to get annoying around the 
time I've gone "(hamburger) Accounts" "(button) Add Account" "(hamburger) 
Settings" "(hamburger) About" and have to click 4 < to get out of that.

(Those parts of this that are already fixed with Frameworks 5.76, just shout 
at me "YOUR FAULT FOR DISREGARDING CMAKE ERRORS")

[ade]
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