Aligned UI

[trevarj]

Working on an aligned UI. Here is the first working iteration.
It will be configurable (with preferred max nickname size), and you can fallback to the old style

Nicks are cut off at 12 chars here.
Not quite sure if the 'activity' messages (join/part/nickchange) should be aligned or leave them as is. Share your thoughts!

[osa1]

Wow.. this looks so good. Thanks for doing this @trevarj!

I like this quite a lot, would be happy to merge and release when ready.

[trevarj]

Tracking branch: https://github.com/trevarj/tiny/tree/aligned-ui

[osa1]

How do I enable it? I just built it but it's using the current UI by default.

[trevarj]

In the default config.yml there are new options:

# (Optional) UI Message Layout Style. Defaults to 'compact'
# ui_style: compact
 ui_style:
   aligned:
     # Nicks greater than this value will be truncated
     max_nick_length: 12

[osa1]

I've been using this for the last couple of days, I think it's great. Some notes:

• This is much easier to read than the current layout
• Not aligning join/leaves or some of the other events looks weird to me. I think all messages (including client messages, errors etc.) should be aligned.
• When the nickname doesn't fit the column I think we should indicate that somehow. Currently if someone has a nick with 15 characters, we show 12, but it's not clear if it has more that we don't show. Perhaps we could use "…".

[trevarj]

I think all messages (including client messages, errors etc.) should be aligned.

Perhaps we could use "…".

Agreed and agreed!

[trevarj]

Updated with changes.

[osa1]

More feedback:

• When I join a channel, and before anyone writes anything people join and leave, it looks like this:

  16:44 <Channel topic>
  16:46               +nick1
  16:47               -nick2
  16:49               +nick3
  

  Indenting when there's nothing on the left looks strange. Though I'm not sure if there's anything to be done about it. How does other clients with aligned UIs show this?

• When a message split into multiple lines, and right after that a client message is shown, it looks like this:

  | 17:00         nick: blah blah blah blah blah |
  |                     blah blah blah blah blah |
  |                     <Client message>         |
  

  Here client message looks like a part of nick's message.

[trevarj]

Indenting when there's nothing on the left looks strange. Though I'm not sure if there's anything to be done about it. How does other clients with aligned UIs show this?

I thought the same thing. I know that weechat does not share lines for many successive join/parts, so a join/part will look like this:

16:47           > | osa1 joined
16:47           > | trevarj joined
16:48           < | osa1 left

When a message split into multiple lines, and right after that a client message is shown, it looks like this:

Do you mean like this example? :

15:09 irc.oftc.net: *** Looking up your hostname...                                                 
      irc.oftc.net: *** Checking Ident                                                              
      irc.oftc.net: *** Found your hostname                                                         
      irc.oftc.net: *** No Ident response                                                                    
      Connected.                                                             // Client msg                       
      Welcome to the OFTC Internet Relay Chat Network trevarj // Client msg

I'm not sure how to solve this one right now.

Indenting when there's nothing on the left looks strange.

I was thinking about this and I'm wondering if it makes sense to label a client message, like this:

15:09 irc.oftc.net: *** Looking up your hostname...                                                 
      irc.oftc.net: *** Checking Ident                                                              
      irc.oftc.net: *** Found your hostname                                                         
      irc.oftc.net: *** No Ident response                                                                    
              tiny: Connected.                                                             // Client msg                       
              tiny: Welcome to the OFTC Internet Relay Chat Network trevarj // Client msg

Making "tiny" formatted differently than a nickname (faded?)

[trevarj]

Another thing to keep in mind is that other clients, from my experience, usually show a timestamp for every message. Maybe this can make it look less strange when there are a lot of indentations and nothing on the left...