/focus ~channel or M-a does not work if a sidebar-group has been collapsed

[marvinwankersteen]

Hello guys,

I am in many channels and like to hide the groups to keep the sidebar clean.

If I change the visibility of, for example, the "public" group with /toggle-sidebar-group public, so that the group is hidden, then a channel within this group can no longer be selected with /focus ~channel or /msg ~channel. The same with collapsed direct messages and /focus @user or /msg @user.
M-a also does not work with collapsed group.

Should or is this the normal behavior?

Also, is there any way to hide the groups at launch? There seems to be no configuration in config.ini.

matterhorn 50200.17.0 (master@7ca52c1)
 using mattermost-api 50200.13.0 (HEAD@273adac)

Marvin

[jtdaugherty]

Hi @marvinwankersteen - thanks for opening this. The behavior you are seeing is a consequence of the implementation: the focus commands only look at what is in the sidebar, and if a sidebar group is collapsed, that effectively removes that group's channels from the list. (This leads to other behaviors that ought to be unsurprising, like C-n and C-p skipping over collapsed groups and M-a and M-s not going back to channels in collapsed groups; after all, if they did otherwise, that would undo the desired collapsing settings.)

I could modify the implementation so that a specific named channel could be focused with /focus even if it's in a collapsed sidebar group, but that will cause the collapsed sidebar group to un-collapse first. I think that would be surprising and perhaps even annoying behavior so I am reluctant to do that. But I can also understand why /focus in particular has surprising behavior in your case, so I'd like to do something about that.

On the topic of configurability, no, there is not currently a way to configure that at startup. Thinking about it a bit, if we did support that, it would need to be per-team, so the configuration sections would need to be per-team as well.

[marvinwankersteen]

Hi @jtdaugherty,

thank you for the detailed explanation.

Would it be possible to implement the behavior as in the WebApp? So that then only this one desired channel is displayed?

In the WebApp I think the behavior is the same for an unread message. Then only this one channel is displayed in the collapsed group.

[jtdaugherty]

I will investigate what that would take.