Closing chats with Escape key [show contact list, hide chat log]

Feature Proposal
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Hello. I’m new to Delta Chat, I hope this is the right place for suggestions like this.

I’m very used to the idea of being able to close chats in desktop messengers by hitting the Escape key. However, this doesn’t seem implemented for the desktop version of Delta Chat. I can’t find a way to close an opened chat at all.

I think the ability to close chats is a very important feature in terms of privacy, as I don’t want to always have any single chat history to be visible at all times, but I still want to be able to monitor for new messages in the contact list area of the UI. Because of this I constantly switch to “Saved messages” and try not to keep any sensitive content/information in there, which isn’t ideal.

TL;DR, this is a proposal for implementing an ability to close chats (including the Escape hotkey for that) and displaying the background image instead. I searched for similar topics in here and was kinda surprised not to find anyone mentioning this.

4 Likes
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yes, that might be a good, little addition, ftr, telegram-macos and whatsapp-web is doing that as well - while signal-macos is not. i asked for that addition at unexpected "Escape" key behaviours · Issue #4128 · deltachat/deltachat-desktop · GitHub - otherwise it will stay as a feature proposal here, in triage with the others

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Another reason to have this is to make is possible to stop marking messages as “read” in the current chat as they arrive.
Indeed there is no way to “close” a chat currently (except in the small screen mode).

We must also consider the fact that some people would prefer “Escape” to focus the composer: Esc should focus the input bar again · Issue #6246 · deltachat/deltachat-desktop · GitHub (but there might be a way to have both, see my comments in the issue)

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but that seems to be far less a thing, so not so sure if that should be done.

none of whatsapp, signal, telegram focus the input bar on hitting escape in a few tests, i also commented in the issue

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Indeed, read receipts is another valid reason for the feature in question.

Not sure about controlling the UI elements focus with Escape, however. I don’t remember that being an existing behavior in any other desktop messenger app. Maybe it would be better to map a separate key combination for that instead?

UPD: I have been notified that such combination already exists - Ctrl + M

1 Like