Ferdi: Emulate Rambox UI top tab bar

[ylluminate]

Currently Ferdi has all of the services down the left side in a vertical fashion. Rambox has workspaces (called Groups) down the left side and then the services in a top tab bar.

It would be nice to, at the very least, allow us to have the services across the top instead of down the side. But it would also be nice to keep the "workspace" drawer open and have small icons, more like this:

[vantezzen]

This would need to be an optional setting - I like the current layout and don’t like the way Rambox handles this.
This could be a setting in the appearance settings (but it looks like it would be too involved to implement as a small setting like this)

[ylluminate]

The problem is that some of us use Ferdi on monitors where it makes sense to consume more vertical space than horizontal due to limitations across. In my case I have a few windows on one display and losing this horizontal space is very painful. Thus I would like to be able to have the left sidebar (if it exists at all) as small as possible - or hideable, while having the services predominantly across the top.

[ylluminate]

The more I think about this, the more I realize the importance of this in relation to this issue:
https://github.com/getferdi/ferdi/issues/62

If we had a small workspace switcher it would be more conducive to actually using workspaces. Presently using workspaces no only takes two clicks, BUT "out of sight; out of mind" is extremely powerful. If we had this side/top bar arrangement it would be more conducive to using lighter weight workspaces during times where we'd like to use fewer services or dedicated workspaces, etc.

[eadmaster]

i second the request: although vertical space is more precious, i've found the Ferdi sidebar not mixing well with services having their own sidebar, which is making the GUI more confusing imo.

[vantezzen]

Closing this for now as this is a relatively large feature and it looks like there are only few users who are interested in this. I still think that vertical space is more limited and that it makes more sense adding the bar the left side instead.

If anyone is interested enough to implement this via an optional toggle in Ferdi's settings I am more than happy to merge that PR into Ferdi.

[kytwb]

We could compromise and let the feature request open for now until one of us or someone else can pick it up. I think we could include in the specs that Ferdi should keep it's original layout by default; but proposing different layout could be an interesting feature, especially to attract users of other similar software that are used to said layout. It's quite a big feature I agree, but could be worth it and is already requested by the community, so let's maybe re-open it?
@ylluminate There is higher priorities being worked on at the moment, so please bear with us, that might not be implemented any time soon 🙏

[ylluminate]

Completely understand and I understand it's not at the top of the list. It's going to be useful and desirable - certainly not something to be forgotten.

[vantezzen]

If there is actual interest in this we can reopen it, it just looked like there was very little interest in this and I tried closing some old feature request that don't seem to receive enough interest to justify implementing them - I think we need to be careful as to not clutter Ferdi's code with features that are bearly used but may be hard to maintain.

This feature would need a separate stylesheet that gets imported when the setting is active and that overwrites the existing styles. We mainly need that stylesheet as implementing the setting to import it will be trivial to implement.

[vantezzen]

I am now currently working on implementing this over at #567 as I saw that we need less style code than I initially thought. I would be nice if people who are interested in this feature can build and test the new option to see if everything works as expected.

The next step is to add another setting to always show the workspace drawer.

Edit: I now also added a new "Always show workspace drawer" setting. For now, we'll not add workspace icons like they used in Rambox but instead just show the normal drawer - that may be another feature request if needed.

[arielaco]

Hey. I thought I'd piggyback on this issue since it's the only one I found related to the sidebar.

I'd like to be able to hide the sidebar unless I hover over it. I find it pretty distracting.

Maybe some of you guys can point me to where I'd code this?

Thank you so much for all this.

[vantezzen]

@arielaco Thank you for your interest. The sidebar is implemented in https://github.com/getferdi/ferdi/blob/develop/src/components/layout/Sidebar.js while Sidebar-related styles are stored in https://github.com/getferdi/ferdi/blob/3a449c20f72ad8a9fd54331b5dc3a5c92989d404/src/styles/tabs.scss

[stale[bot]]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. Please check if this issue is still relevant and please close it if it's not. This will make sure that our open issues are actually of use and reduce the list of obsolete issues. Thank you for your contributions.

[AlexKalyo]

Hi @vantezzen,

Any way to get a version with the sidebar being at the top?
Maybe I've missed something but I'm definitely interested in testing it. I also feel uncomfortable with double sidebar (Ferdi + Slack for example)

Let me know!
Thanks :-)

[vantezzen]

@AlexKalyo You will currently need to set up a development instance of Ferdi on your computer (https://github.com/getferdi/ferdi#development) as we still need people to test this before we can merge it in.

[stale[bot]]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. Please check if this issue is still relevant and please close it if it's not. This will make sure that our open issues are actually of use and reduce the list of obsolete issues. Thank you for your contributions.