stripedpajamas / gester

scuttlebutt chat ui

🐹 gester 🐹

p2p chat app built on scuttlebutt

more on scuttlebutt: https://www.scuttlebutt.nz/

potentially chat with friends on the same network without even being connected to the internet 🙌

this is just a more user friendly ui for scat 🐭

download binaries

here

tips and tricks

• you can press meta+k as a shortcut to start a private chat (idea borrowed from Slack)
• you can join a pub from the Help menu
• you can tab complete names and emoji
• click on a name/id (or search for one) to pull up follow/block options
• from the author view, you can assign a new name to someone by double-clicking their name

install / run from source

$ npm install
$ npm start

what's happening

gester/scat uses a special message type scat_message. this means that if you're using something like Patchwork, your feed won't be all gobbled up by chat messages. And scat won't be all gobbled up by your posts.

but since it's all the same protocol and all the same feeds, all the same people are there. gester/scat uses the ssb-about plugin. if your sbot doesn't have this plugin, you will just see ids... no names.

gester/scat will honor self-identification above a 3rd party's identification of another user, and will honor your identification of another user above their own self-identification. a 3rd party's identification of another user is not honored at all.

license

MIT

gester's Issues

Show something if indexing

Right now it just looks like no messages are there if sbot is indexing

Dark mode option is backwards

When I ran on master, Gester opened up straight to dark theme and then when I switched to dark theme in the menu it switched to light theme.

hotkeys and focus

• escape out of the user search bar
• escape out of the start private message modal
• autofocus the start private message input

allow double-click edit someone's name in author drawer

doesn't work for first timers

if a user has never used another ssb app (e.g. patchwork) to get things all set up in ~/.ssb, gester just dies silently.

add menu item to join pub

Gester | Join Pub

follow/unfollow/block/unblock ui glitch

after you click the button it stays in the 'clicked' ui state until you click somewhere else

Markup for messages starting with mentions is broken for me

For example, this is the raw message Lance sent to me:

{
  "key": "%GB/67vwA+ZOU9E1zBKnd66BIW84t1YSTUIgXnnm9xvM=.sha256",
  "value": {
    "previous": "%9KydQF48RH/m6zR9ChRodSKMAPZdThOYjM1w0WCtz64=.sha256",
    "sequence": 1404,
    "author": "@W87GwaaxNj0PSBbtc5qUm/A/xOO8AWPdNtJn6hzR8s0=.ed25519",
    "timestamp": 1538659984858,
    "hash": "sha256",
    "content": {
      "type": "scat_message",
      "text": "@happy0at this stage yes... I'm away for two weeks, and only get back that week so I might be wrecked. :sleepy:"
    },
    "signature": "Rz+0nnQ0E1ucihu+7bh81mFSQtQK29YArnFrSfishtYbundYfWBe2qKUZUcYrcSO7sLulJl0KQl75zpUMZ/9Bg==.sig.ed25519"
  }
}

This is how it was rendered:

Text: [@happy0]{.mention😪

Screenshot:

notifications don't work well

sometimes things are unread when they shouldn't be
sometimes you get a notification when you shouldn't
sometimes you don't when you should
it's a mess

fake closing the app doesn't allow reopen

if you click the x on the mac app, you can't open it back up without full exit and reopen.

fix toast overflow when window is small

when following/unfollowing someone, the success message overflows the toast.

idea: make overflow ellipsis instead of wrap

Dark Theme

notification glitch

it seems like the last private message received from someone (even after it is read) might show as unread when opening the app back up.

Initial message data from new ssb user causes Gester to load very slowly on startup

When someone becomes a new ssb user they download every public ssb chat that has ever been sent. Since Gester loads the last 2 weeks of downloaded data and this new user has downloaded all of the messages within the last 2 weeks, this causes all existing public messages to be rendered on startup. This makes Gester very laggy and takes a few minutes to get to a useable state.

The best fix for this would be to change how Gester decides what messages to load. If we could find a way to pull the messages that have been sent in the last 2 weeks instead of downloaded in the last 2 weeks, that would be a great fix.

Now, as ssb grows, if 2 weeks of public chats sent increases to an amount close to the number of all public chats now, we will start to see this problem again. A long term fix would be rendering a max number of messages on startup and having the option to load more on scroll up.

unread doesn't bold if message comes in while not focused