UI Feedback
The redesign of Gajim is interesting and I am sure a lot of hard work went in it, however, some aspects of it make the UX very frustrating in my personal experience. Personally my experience would improve a lot with some small changes (user-optional in some cases). Following is a list both of issues and new ideas:
- Minimum width is too big and makes the app hard to use on small monitors and other setups. After a certain point some icons (eg send file button) get hidden but not others. This could be fixed simply by a) making the message input smaller to make room for these icons, or b) hiding the icons on both left and right, making the experience more consistent and easier to use with small setups. Moreover, after that, there is another point beyond which you can't make the window smaller anymore, this should also be removed.
- Multiline message input behavior is inconsistent, at first if you write a second line then the first line becomes hidden, then after more lines you can see two lines at once but still not the first line, and then finally a scrollbar is added if you write a lot of lines at which point you can finally see everything. (tested on Lubuntu) Moreover the input only expands vertically up to a certain limited height which makes it very hard to deal with writing long messages. It should expand a lot more by default or at least the max height should be a user option.
- A user should be able to constantly see the contact list while making it take up very small space if they want to (eg you see only avatar for each contact). This would be consistent with some popular messaging apps. Optimal would be an option for users to replace the workspaces on the left bar by this. A lot of people would prefer it that way. It would also save a lot of space. Actually if it replaces workspaces, user should be able to see usernames depending on how big they make the left bar.
- You should be able to drag a contact/workspace to a new window.
- User option to put contact list either on left of chat or at bottom of it by tabbed navigation, with option to show/hide usernames (keeping avatar only) in both instances.
- Option to hide workspace name and contact search bar.