zulip / zulip-terminal

Official Zulip terminal client.
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'All messages' are not consistently accessible compared to P/#/f #1505

Open neiljp opened 3 months ago

neiljp commented 3 months ago

Bug description

As discussed in the past, and again in #1480, the key(s) for 'all messages' (a, Esc ) do not work reliably except when a message is selected.

This compares with P, #, f, which are also in the top left list of views (as the web app now names/groups them), which are accessible from:

Discussed at: #zulip-terminal > Make the ALL_MESSAGES command work everywhere

How is the bug triggered?

How can you reproduce the bug?

  1. Enter different areas of the UI where one of P/#/f are confirmed to change narrow (as above, and excluding the central message area)
  2. The a hotkey fails to trigger a change in the central active narrow (message list), as does Esc, though also behaves differently depending upon context

What did you expect to happen?

For context, when a message is selected, narrowing keys like these are currently expected to keep message focus, but change the narrow to view around it - this is not the intent for this fix.

Instead, when selecting a view/narrow explicitly (stream/topic/DMs/etc), from a side panel or hotkey from these locations, this should enter the first unread message in that view. This is what should already occur with the existing P/#/f hotkeys.

One possible challenge here is that Esc is used for various other functions, so they should likely take precedence, for example:

Similarly, when a text box is open, such as during searches or when the compose box is open, regular keys such as a would not be expected to cause narrowing.

Related aspects

These were discussed in the topic linked above:

How are you running the application?

Please include as many of the following as possible:

If possible, please provide details from the About menu: (hotkey: Meta + ?) (this can provide some of the details above)

zulipbot commented 3 months ago

Hello @zulip/server-hotkeys members, this issue was labeled with the "area: hotkeys" label, so you may want to check it out!