Explore tidying "current message recipients" (minimal bottom compose area?)

neiljp commented 3 years ago

ZT currently has a "current message recipients" (CMR) area at the top. This is in addition to the current narrow indicator above that. Discussion in #zulip-terminal>Message header simplification? suggested we should tidy this somehow.

The CMR area is an attempt to provide an equivalent to the "floating recipient bar" (FRB) of the webapp, so that for long sequences of the same recipients where the header would be off the top of the view, this makes it visible. In the webapp this "floats" at the top and shows the recipients of the message at the top - in ZT the CMR focuses on the selected message itself.

For the CMR/FRB, there are various aspects suggested to try to tidy this, including:

hiding it when in a topic/PM narrow (non-interleaved) - except this would cause the view to jump around
removing the 'CMR' title text, particularly if we can emphasize that the CMR box is directly connected to the selected message

Another option, inspired by the webapp exploring moving towards having a more prominent set of buttons at the bottom to reply/compose messages, is to move the CMR to the bottom. The potential webapp design has the "reply" button being contextual, indicating who the recipients would be. A ZT design could use that for indicating the contextual reply, as well as possibly adding hotkey hints like we have elsewhere. This would always be present, but simplify the top area. On opening compose, this would be replaced by the compose box.

With a reply, the default filled-in values would allow any context of the message to remain visible (unless modified); the only other potential loss of context would be when composing a new stream/private message.

The Narrow text at the top would be expanded to avoid the shorthand "topic narrow" and similar when fully narrowed, which has also been a design issue for a while, but looked strange when it was duplicated with the CMR text directly below. The first bullet point above was one original solution to this.

preetmishra commented 3 years ago

In addition, it would be interesting to explore how the tidying up affects the "Messages" title. There has been a discussion in #zulip-terminal>Message view title regarding whether we should shelve the title given that it is evident that the middle view is dedicated for messages.

lzmartinico commented 2 years ago

I would also like to add to the redesign discussion that the CMR panel can often be confusing when the top message displayed doesn't have it's stream/topic header because it's too long; in these cases it can look as if the message was sent in the same topic as the currently selected message

zulip / zulip-terminal

Explore tidying "current message recipients" (minimal bottom compose area?) #1016