Expected behavior
You go into the chat an are able to select all messages for further action
Actual behavior
n/a
what would be the “further action” for which you would need a “select all”?
Personally, copy-paste. 
For instance, when I have a chat in which someone gives me lots of useful info, resource links, etc., I may then want to copy-paste that into a text file, save it, maybe edit it into a write-up summary I can send them to check I understand…
This is easy to do in Pidgin, and I found it really useful. I did not use it for most chats, but I used it regularly, and referred back to some of those files years later.
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i see, thanks for coming back.
in practise, would copy-important-messages-to-clipboard really be “select all” often? i mean, in most cases, there is a chat before the “useful info”. and if not, it is probably easy enough to use multiple selection.
multiple selection, however, is not available on desktop yet - but we just got multiple selection for that chatlist, so, things are moving
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I got a very specific use case actually. I would select all, then deselect one while hopefully keep all the others and delete them. It’s about managing tons of email based notifications without loosing the chat and it’s settings (mute in particular)
. Very specific.
@thobux, I can see wanting to delete all but one message, especially for bots whose first message is a help page (tho they will often repeat the help message if cued). Am I right that the ability to keep empty chats would be useful to you?
@r10, I think you are right that I would use multiple-selection more; by default, Pidgin did not save chats when the app was closed, so that was a bit different. But I’ve used both in programs that have both.
I am more likely to want to save the whole chat if it is, say, a newsletter or an ad-hoc group divvying up some work beween members (so I have a record who is doing what, and know whom to talk to when things go wrong). One may also unexpectedly have to preserve whole chats for legal reasons.
Right, that’s what would help me . Major reason is the storage limit of chatmail instances. I do get images from a camera as notifications
Maybe a chat export could be a solution? A chat could be saved as a text file to copy all messages from it or to send the entire file.
In my opinion, it would be best to outsource such a feature to a webxdc app. Thus, changes to DeltaChat would not be necessary. A user could create a backup and then open it with the app and select a chat to export.
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In my case selecting all pics in the gallery would also work
Chat export would work well for me. Export to a more archival format – by which I mean one that is generally more widely-used and easier to convert – would be a useful complement to the SQL database.
I think a regular text file is a very universal format that will certainly be readable by computers in the future. Furthermore, it’s probably easier from a development perspective than creating an HTML file from the SQLite database. However, HTML would be better suited for displaying reactions in the chat history, like in Telegram.
Generally, I consider it very important that users can save their chat histories outside of DC in a format readable without the app. This gives them more freedom, as they become less dependent on the app. Reading the chat directly in the database isn’t particularly user-friendly.
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For most chats, Unicode text works well, even for reactions. Sometimes the images etc. are important, though. A markdown format might work: it could be read as plaintext or rendered to get images etc. (if you had it linked to the folder of embedded files).
I did suggest MailSQL storage format standard?, which in theory would also work because you could interconvert and view your messages in the threaded view of another mailclient. But obviously export would be much easier to implement!