Element-web: Decide if drag&drop room lists should come back

[turt2live]

Currently we don't support dragging rooms between tags on the redesign. We should either support it or rip out all the code which supports it.

[Cadair]

+1 to bringing it back

[turt2live]

(before we end up with a billion +1 comments, please use github reactions on the top comment instead)

[jimmycuadra]

Is there another way to reorder rooms within the same section? I used to use drag and drop to do this. It's not clear from the description if there's another way to do this or whether it's currently impossible in the redesign.

[ara4n]

currently impossible; workaround is to use https://tags.t2bot.io

[lampholder]

Discussing this with Nad and Amandine yesterday - we're all keen for drag and drop to come back _if we can guarantee that we will execute and maintain it well_.

If we do it, I want us to do it so that:

• it has finely tuned heuristics to avoid accidental drag and drop
• it defends against the state changing underneath you mid drag
• it defends against the state changing just before you drag
• it works well in all browsers
• it does not introduce any performance regressions
• it supports undo to avoid making mistakes that are hard to correct
• it has a sophisticated local echo awareness so that any changes made via drag and drop don't glitch back and forth
• it can feedback to the user if whatever changes you made _don't_ end up being persisted remotely for whatever reason

My personal bias is that we implement our UX such that it works stably and well _without_ drag and drop, and then once that solid baseline is in place, consider then whether it's worth the additional investment to add a robust dnd layer on top.

[alphapapa]

This issue seems relevant: https://github.com/vector-im/riot-web/issues/8723 It claims that a "labs" setting exists to re-enable room user-tags, but I can't find such a labs setting.

Please bring back this feature. I used it extensively to group related rooms. Now they're all in one big "rooms" group, which is useless to me.

[jryans]

This issue seems relevant: #8723 It claims that a "labs" setting exists to re-enable room user-tags, but I can't find such a labs setting.

(As mentioned in #8723, it's available on https://riot.im/develop only at the moment.)

[JesseNaranjo]

@lampholder https://github.com/vector-im/riot-web/issues/8614#issuecomment-472849425
If we do it, I want us to do it so that:
...
* it supports undo to avoid making mistakes that are hard to correct
...

I agree with everything on the list, except the "undo" line. I think undo in a drag-n-drop situation should be fairly easy to do manually - especially if you can only drag one item at a time.

I am not opposed to the undo feature, but if implementing "drag-n-drop undo" requirement is a big hurdle, I would rather see everything else implemented without this.

[alphapapa]

• it has finely tuned heuristics to avoid accidental drag and drop
• it defends against the state changing underneath you mid drag
• it defends against the state changing just before you drag
• it works well in all browsers
• it does not introduce any performance regressions
• it supports undo to avoid making mistakes that are hard to correct
• it has a sophisticated local echo awareness so that any changes made via drag and drop don't glitch back and forth
• it can feedback to the user if whatever changes you made _don't_ end up being persisted remotely for whatever reason

I don't think any features in any software I've used fulfill that list of requirements. For example, file managers don't have finely tuned heuristics to avoid accidental drag and drop, and that's in a context where such accidents could cause data loss.

We're talking about room tags here. The worst that could happen is that a user would have to drag and drop a room into a tag again.

[swedneck]

Perhaps one option could be to make the order lockable from the settings? I at least don't want to re-order my rooms very often, and would be fine with having to untick an option to be able to re-order them and then re-tick the option.

[BloodyIron]

I'm in favour of click and dragging between sections, such as 1:1 or rooms to favourites, etc. Like, that's just so convenient, why _not_ have it? IMO

[turt2live]

I've closed/linked a bunch of issues above in favour of this one. If/when we do bring the feature back, the above issues should be considered.

[BloodyIron]

Drag & Drop stuff is always welcome!