I suggest using a smaller green/blue full circle in the top right area of each sidebar icon to indicate a notification/new post. The current half circle off the left edge looks like a broken rendering issue.

This is FreeCodeCamp/Casual channel and it's name is only shown partial. But others are shown with/without their organisational prefixes.

I was searching for Casual and couldn't find it at first look but after sometime, I found by guessing it.

checking out the new 'next' sidebar, and i like the look overall, it's kinda hard to see black or dark grey icons such as our "GetGrav" one. Quite a few of them are like this as you use GitHub's project icons and GitHub has a white background.

One option is to allow custom project icons:

https://github.com/gitterHQ/gitter/issues/762

Another option, would be to allow custom backgrounds behind the sidebar. Either from a predefined list, or better yet, the ability to use your own. This heads in a direction of Gitter Themes which obviously is a more involved prospect, but could add a lot of value.

I have strong protan color blindness, and I've found it quite difficult to distinguish the text on the unread badges from the background of the badge.

For example:

Might look like this:

(Obviously, I have no idea whether this is an accurate reflection of how I see it but to me the simulation's background colour is a bit darker than how I see it)

Making the text bolder or using a different background/foreground would really help.

Some useful keyboard navigations shortcuts

In left-menu expanded state,

• UP/DOWN ARROW — navigate through the list.
• LEFT/RIGHT ARROW — focus the mini-bar and left-menu respectively.

In left-menu collapsed state,

• LEFT/RIGHT ARROW — temporarily opens the left-menu for navigation

In both the above views,

• ENTER — selects the currently focused item.
  • If item is an icon in mini-bar, open the associated left-menu
  • If item is a channel in left-menu, load the corresponding channel

In Overall UI

• ESC — toggle between input textarea, chat area and navigation area focus.
  • If focus is in a channel message input, then ESC should move the focus to input textarea.
• CTRL+S — Focus the search input
• CTRL+SHIFT+LEFT ARROW — toggle left-menu

In Chat area focus mode

• UP/DOWN ARROW — scroll through chat messages

In Input area focus mode

• Refer https://github.com/gitterHQ/gitter/issues/1157
• Refer https://github.com/gitterHQ/gitter/issues/1158

Temporarily highlight/flash the focused area while using keyboard only focus navigation.

Currently the list of communities (orgs) in the left menu filter area is seemingly random. We're looking at ways to fix this - for instance the ability to manually order them by drag & drop. Additional suggestions welcome.

Using back or forward button to switch channel doesn't change the icon highlighting.

The private channel icons may be overlay-ed with a lock 🔒 icon in the left menu channel list.

The tooltips look currently looks boring and native.
With new menu, new pretty tooltips would be awesome ✨

Tested on OSX 10.10.5, Gitter app Version 1.162 (1.162)

...according to my toast, only!

The search input box takes input from keyboard even when left-menu is collapsed.

How to Reproduce

• Collapse the left-menu
• Click the Search icon and focus the search input box
• Now move the mouse out so that the left-menu collapses
• Type something and it appears in the search box and search is performed

How should it behave

On mouse out, when the left-menu collapses, the focus should be back to input textarea.

Something got mixed up in the description of this originally from https://github.com/troupe/gitter-webapp/issues/1336

When opening Gitter.im, for existing users, we should always restore the menu bar to the previous state.

Although I can see the functionality that the new vertical bar provides on the left, I will seldom use it. Therefore the width it takes on my screen is quite unbearable as it means I have less width for reading messages. Please make it collapsible.

Thanks

In the left menu, the favourite channel icons are not overlayed with star icon 🌟

I clicked the collapse menu several times and this is the result 😜

How to reproduce?

while left menu collapsed, click, then double click the toggle collapse button
or while expanded, just double click the toggle collapse button

Buggy Collapse

might NOT be related to #7

Minibar org active/selected state not fully drawn.

Probably has to do with the scrollbar (pointing out the obvious although it looked fine when that PR was made).

@abhisekp and I are the only ones who have reproduced and reported this. Happens on OSX and Windows.

How to reproduce

• Go to any room
• type /query @username

See that the icon doesn't change highlight in the menu bar.

It's possible to get multiple items selected in the left menu when switching views.

Minibar icons not appearing on mobile Safari. As reported by @mrkeuz

How to reproduce?

• Search in one channel so that some result chat messages show
• Go to another channel
• Click on the chat message

See that it points to the current channel

As reported by @pyry

When you change from "People" or "All conversations" to "Search" the search field is automatically focused with blinking keyboard cursor and I can start typing, however when changing from any community/org in the scrollable list to "Search" it is not focused there and you need to click the "What are you looking for" placeholder to start typing.

To demonstrate what is happening (red outline represents focus):

In the Organisation/User specific channel view or in the "All Conversation" channel view in the left menu,
by default, the favourite channel should show at the top and then the other channels based on a "frecency" (frequency + recent view) algorithm similar to #2.

• Mentioned rooms
• Favourite rooms
• Last accessed room (for org./user specific view) (change based on human psychology)
  • 6 Last accessed rooms (for All Conversation view)
• Others based on frecency algo.

In the old design, CTRL+F used to focus on the search bar.

But it's not working in the new menu.

NOTE: also consider a collapsed left menu.

It's possible to get multiple items selected in the left menu when switching views.

After writing some text in the search box, if one tries to type some characters in front of the existing text, the cursor automatically jumps to the end after typing single character at the front.

If you're in the mac client, there's no padding to force the list above the faded out area at the bottom of the conversation list.

As reported by @kbrock

While the search has been pretty useless with the old design due to not being able to sort them by "most recent" (or anything else at all), the new design broke it even further: The links from search results (which are supposed to take you to the discussion at that point in time) just don't work anymore. Clicking on them does nothing.

For the new look, when you have the All Conversations area open in Mac OS X, the scrollbar for that area appears on the left side when scrolling instead of on the right.

The user icons are not visible and there is no distinction between people and rooms.

When I /leave a channel, the channel is removed from the left menu list of organisation channels and removes the organisation icon in the mini-bar but the left menu shows other channels specific to that organisation. And redirects the view to the gitter home page.

Where is vscode channel? 😕

How it should behave?

• Unjoin me from channel
• Keep the room view

Currently, you need to click and show the left menu but it wouldn't be a bad idea to show the left menu on hover too.

But don't load and show the left-menu channel list instantly while scroll the icons in the mini-bar. And after scroll ends, add small delay and show the left-menu channel list associated with the currently hovered over icon.

Bonus: If it shows on hover, then don't show the suggested rooms (if already not cached) and save some API request bandwidth.

Channel switching is an important part of gitter and makes the user read various channels and stick to Gitter for more amount of time. (avoiding other productive works 😜 )

So, I propose easy channel switch using "fuzzy search algo + frecency" for the top search bar (without any network data transfer). The search can hit the API after 10s to show any additional things, etc or do whatever the normal search behaves like.

I wonder if I can create a chat with several contributors to a project (which I invite to participate), whose messages would only be shared between the group (a la secret facebook group), but most importantly other people would not be able to interfere in the conversation. I am asking this because while sharing with the world is nice, you also want to avoid a few trolls who disturb the flow or purpose of a public group.

Gitter is a world in itself and there are good people and bad people in the world. Let's all accept the fact that there are places in gitter where -21 are not allowed. 👀

And with such an enormous growth of population, privacy is not something to think twice. ✌️

I propose a search history clear button underneath the search input box.

If you have your room set to "Announcements" the little green-bordered dot isn't always clearing correctly.

Z-index bug if you hover someone in the right toolbar, the header is appearing above the popover.

Since the organization and user specific channels only show channel list of that org./user, so the prefix is redundant and may be dropped.

How to reproduce?

• go to Fav. and see ur favourites ordered according to ur choice
• now randomly click on various user/org. icons
• now go back to Fav. section

See that the favourites are disordered and even after toggling the collapse/expanded of the left menu, the view remains unordered

But after clicking people icon and going back to favourite they re-ordered

NOTE: Clicking on any other icon and going back won't work and also in the disordered view, the channels could be dragged and re-ordered. But I've no idea how it got re-ordered because just right after trying to re-order the dragged channel, the whole favourite section gets ordered as it was previously.

Ordered view

Buggy view

Faded effect would look cool in the scroll edges.

Render/paint issue: when hovering the org drawer, it blinks.

Tested on OSX, Gitter app Version 1.162 (1.162)

If you keep the left menu in a collapsed state, quite frequently it doesn't collapse after room change and then mousing out.

1. Click on GitterHQ community in left hand nav
2. left hand nav opens up.
3. scroll to the bottom of All Rooms
4. click + Show All (It navs to gitterHQ/rooms)
5. View will change to show all gitter HQ rooms.
6. Click on GitterHQ community in left hand nav (same as step 1)
7. Nothing happens

I expected the left hand nav to open again.
If you click on other communities and fiddle a bit, it comes back.

This is on mac app and chrome web ui

Atleast a 500ms debounce delay would be good enough for the search input in large channels. It searches rapidly now which makes the whole UX feel slow.