DeltaTouch: Help testing the upcoming 2.9.0 release

Apologies if this is the wrong place for this; let me know and I’ll move it. Having had a bit more time, I think I have some more-useful reports; in the future I should maybe mull over a new client for a week or so before making any reports.

Notifications are not causing errors now. :thumbs_up:

Fewer of the emojis are rendering in chats; there are two smilies, neutral and frowning, for instance. I think this change happened at the 2.8-2.9 transition. Maybe I am missing a font dependency? But some of the missing emojis were still rendering in profile names for a day or so; they have now stopped. No emojis render in avatars (if prefixed to a profile name as in the image).

When I tap the ā€œchatā€ button in the public-bots bot, nothing happens [EDIT: a long tap brings a browserlike drop-down menu in the top-left corner; I can add the bot by clicking on the browserlike menu’s copy-link option, then pasting the link under (a bit unintuitively) ā€œScan QR Codeā€]. Going via the https interface works. When I added one bot, it said ā€œEstablishing end-to-end encryption, please waitā€¦ā€, but never said ā€œMessages are end-to-end encryptedā€ (as another bot did). The fingerprints are there, though.

I realize this one is my fault, but the do-nothing buttons are very variously labelled.
*ā€œCloseā€ in the hamburger menu in the chat topbar
*ā€œCancelā€ in the attachment menu
*ā€œCloseā€ in hamburger menu from swiping a message left
*ā€œSource code/OKā€ in the app hamburger menu
I think ā€œCancelā€ is the most conventional word, but any consistent word would make the app easier to navigate without thinking.

Again, you have every right to ignore these, and none of them stop me using the app. Thank you for all the work you’ve put into this recently.

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I am not aware that I changed something regarding fonts or emojis. Did you update the system around that time, too? It’s strange that so few emojis render for you. This is how it looks like on my pinephone with mobian:

I’m not sure whether this is a thing in the system font configuration or something that can easily be fixed in the app itself without shipping a complete font. I dimly remember that I had this problem when running the app on Debian. I did something like similar to [SOLVED] No colorful emoji with fontconfig 2.15 / Applications & Desktop Environments / Arch Linux Forums, but I don’t know anything about font config, so better not follow my advice here.

In any case, I’ll put looking into emojis on the todo list, but won’t be able to work on this soon.

Yes, that was not handled well by DeltaTouch. It has been fixed now: #65 - correctly render emoji as text avatar if name of chat/contact starts with emoji - lk108/deltatouch - Codeberg.org

If you want to, you can install the version that contains the fix: https://codeberg.org/lk108/-/packages/generic/deltatouch/pr65/files/3728356

Hmm, looks like the outdated webengine in Qt5 doesn’t play along with the Webxdc of the bot. Unfortunately, DeltaTouch is stuck with Qt5 at the moment. I’ll contact the author of the bot, maybe it can be fixed in the bot itself, but not sure. Sorry about that!

Uh, right, I should have taken a closer look myself when adapting it. Will correct it.

Thank you for the emoji-avatar fix, it looks like it was a bit of a nuisance.

I shall play about and see if I can get them to appear on the menu and in chats. It is just local; contacts see and send them (even the one still on 1.1) but I get boxes. Thanks for the link. Some emojis were missing boxes long before, there are just more now. I don’t recall anything extraneous, no system updates etc., but cannot be sure there was nothing. There have been few updates recently as Trixie just came out, so I shall be updating Mobian soon.

Actually, long touches on both the bot buttons drop menus. I do hope we’ll get a bit less monopoly power in the browser market and the setting of web standards soon.

A more widely-compatible bot would be nice, but the public-bots bot is functional with a bit of copypasta. I’ve tried the better part of a dozen bots; they worked apart from Mangadlbot, which did not work at all: buttons were mailto links opening in Neomutt (sadly I can’t quite use Deltatouch as my default mailer).

The add-account dialogues all have ā€œCancelā€ buttons, but they are the same grey colour as all the others, unlike the cancel-buttons elsewhere, so less fast to find.

Thanks for all your help!

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I was wrong, it’s actually something to be fixed in DeltaTouch.

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Minor UI snag: in groups, I can’t tell who authored a reaction. Nor can I copy the reaction and paste it elsewhere, which if it is a non-rendering emoji means I can’t tell what emoji it is.

It would be useful to have a copy-last-n-words function as well as a per-message copy function. I don’t know how feasible it would be, though.

If you click on the reaction, a popup should open that tells who reacted with what (provided that the emoji renders ofc).

Ok, I’ll put that on the todo list.

Is this covered by this PR or do you mean something else?

I’ve tried clicking on the reaction and it works, even when the emoji hasn’t rendered. So that’s fine, sorry!

My rather specific situation aside, I don’t think being able to copy individual reactions is terribly useful. I suppose it could go fairly neatly in the popup – but honestly I would not ask you to spend time on that.

The PR looks useful, but the current whole-message copy-text in the swipe-left menu actually works fine for me; I can edit in whatever I paste it into.

I was thinking something that would let me copy multiple messages at once, like Pidgin’s save-chat function, where you can save it as text or HTML and then edit it down. For instance, one of my chats consists mostly of useful links in a single subject; it would be handy saved as a file. A multi-message copy would also let me copy reactions, but would be more broadly useful. But I don’t know how feasible it is.

Uh, I hope you don’t mind a change in UX regarding this as described in my most recent comment in the PR.

That’s certainly feasible, but I’m afraid there’s currently not enough capacity for the effort required.

Not at all! It will add functionality. I’m just saying it isn’t a big deal for me; I can imagine others may find it really handy. I won’t oppose new functionality just because I currently don’t use it. :slight_smile:

No worries on the multi-message copy, either. It would be handy but I can work around it. I wasn’t sure if the append-model storage would make it easy or hard.

Minor progress:

Some of the emojis in the image below are black and white. Theses are the ones I used to have. Some are colourful. These are the ones that were not rendering for me.

Contrast Discourse, apparently using the Twemoji font:
:smile: :slightly_smiling_face: :joy: :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes: :frowning: :+1: :-1: :100: :rocket: :tada:

I now have only a smaller set of black-and-white emoji. All the other programs on my system use the Noto Color Emoji font as configured; Deltatouch is overriding that config.

The black emojis that I do have do not seem to match those of any font on my system. The larger older set might have matched the emojis rendered by DejaVu Sans.

The potted plant emoji is fairly distinctive. The ones here on the forum look like those from Twitter’s Twemoji font, with a less reddish pot:
:potted_plant: :potted_plant:
My system renders the Noto potted plant except on DeltaTouch, where it renders as two black stems which may represent a ZZ plant. I have not yet identified that ZZ font.