Leftmost bar wastes space

[fbruetting]

• Browser: Flatpak (so guess Chromium)
• OS: Fedora Silverblue 29

Description

As you see in the screen shot below, the left-most bar wastes a lot of space. Additionally, I don’t think that the ruler makes any sense there. Can’t those two icons be put at the bottom of the contact/room list?

[Half-Shot]

It's meant to be for community icons, so at least for me it's not wasting any space.

[fbruetting]

Ah ok, then I have a proposal: These icons could be shown at the bottom of the conversation list like in the following image until they use the height of this space up to 20…30 % – then those icons could be outsourced to that separate pane.

However, the ruler is superfluous in that in my case empty pane. ;)

For getting people to use Riot/Matrix, I think it would be reasonable to cut the defaults down to the bare minimum „normal“ people would need/use. Riot then would look less complicated and hopefully get more people into using it. Advanced features are always cool, but should rather be hidden behind switches in the settings until users need or want it.

[nerwall]

Integrating the community icons into the same pane as contacts and rooms would significantly improve usability with a narrow window. 900px wide is plenty to use Signal, Gajim, Hexchat, and Mumble in, but riot is incredibly cramped.

[aladar42]

Is there no way to turn this bar off? I have no use for it, and it really does waste space for me.

[Half-Shot]

@aladar42

Under Preferences in Settings

[aladar42]

That doesnt work on my client. Its off, but nothing changed, not even after a restart.

[aladar42]

Okay, I figured it out. Apparently I have to disable it, restart, then resize the room panel all the way to the max, then all the way to the min, at which point it disappears and I can resize it to the size I want. That... isnt the expected behavior, I would assume?

[Half-Shot]

I think that's #8418

[t3chguy]

Closing as that is indeed #8418

[fbruetting]

My issue is about the design. #8418 is about the settings not working.

[t3chguy]

I mean sure, but you can hide it if you don't like that, will re-open for discussion, maybe the setting could be a bit more automatic

[fbruetting]

If you don’t need it at all, yes. But as soon as you have one entry, there is a lot of wasted space, which I think should be improved, especially when the window is left/right tiled. ;)

[aaronraimist]

Related: #6494

[t3chguy]

The discussion boils down to #6494, closing in favour of it

[fbruetting]

#6494 is about totally hiding the panel when you’re not at all a member in a community. My issue in contrast is more about UI optimization – which especially is important if you’re in just a few communities. There, it would be disadvantageous if that panel would be completely hidden – but showing the current panel would also waste a lot of screen space.

That’s why I proposed to move the communities into the contacts panel if there are just a few. Ideal would be a responsive panel, which also shows the communities below or above the contacts (if they’re just a few) and then source them out into a separate area (i.e. current implementation) if the number of communities increases. Maybe also dependent on the width of this combined panel.

You’re sure you want to close this?

[t3chguy]

Will re-open to track a "combined left panel" mode sort of thing

[Caspy7]

Was asked to give my input here...

Apologies for any rehash, I don't currently have the brain juice to read through all the comments.
I complained about the wasted space on the left side. Fortunately I was in the right channel and someone told me how to hide it with a pref.

I'd say this is a suboptimal situation as most users aren't going to readily discover this resolution. Heck, I scrolled through the prefs before and the had no idea what it was.

My idea on resolving this is rather than having an entire toolbar, place the panel as a box below the profile name/avatar (above the room list). Use the + like normal but when there are communities show them as overlapping, stacked circles. Expand them as a drawer on hover. If hover is too problematic a UX, then click to expand I suppose.

[MadLittleMods]

To give an updated reference with spaces enabled, the spaces panel with no joined spaces looks like the following:

[nadonomy]

Closing in favour of #18898.