Signal-desktop: Allow the user to deselect conversations

[laurencebgood]

• [X] I have searched open and closed issues for duplicates

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Bug description

Feature Request: allow the user to deselect conversations

Detailed description

When the client is first started, no conversation is selected and the client displays "Select a contact or group to start chatting". However, once the user selects a contact or group, there is no way to get back to this state, only change between different contacts or groups.

When the client is foregrounded, any unread messages in the chat that is selected will be marked as read, so it would be helpful to have no conversation selected, so that messages are not inadvertently marked as read when quickly moving between windows or applications.

[leafcutterant]

This would also be an anti-shoulder surfing feature, so that you don't have to expose a conversation of yours just to open Signal.

Idea: deselect conversations by clicking the "Signal" rectangle in the top left corner, and by right-clicking the active contact and having a context menu item.

[laurencebgood]

Many clients such as telegram and Facebook messenger's also let you press
the escape key, which feels very natural to me.

On Nov 16, 2017 1:49 PM, "leafcutterant" [e-mail] wrote:

This would also be an anti-shoulder surfing feature, so that you don't
have to expose a conversation of yours just to open Signal.

Idea: deselect conversations by clicking the "Signal" rectangle in the top
left corner, and by right-clicking the active contact and having a context
menu item.

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[deutrino]

See also #768, which proposes to not mark messages read in a focused conversation when the user is idle.

[keynlotepan]

I vote for this feature, too. The current behaviour makes me fear to overlook new messages (on my mobile while my desktop app is active too and consumes them). Possible key might also be ctrl-click, according to deselecting in file manager. Thanks.

[laurencebgood]

As more of my friends and other contacts adopt Signal Desktop, the lack of this is starting to drive me crazy. On many occasions, messages I've sent are marked as having been seen very quickly, but then never seen by the person I sent them to. When I mention this to them much later, they realize it's because I was the last person they spoke to on desktop. It's very frustrating.

[mjog]

The only work around for this at the moment is to close Signal, then re-open it.

[tykazzz]

That feature would be awesome, I switched from Telegram which has it, you can deselect by clicking escape.

[tribut]

This has been possible for a while using the (somewhat hard to memorize) shortcut Ctrl + Shift + C.

[laurencebgood]

Wow Ctrl + Shift + C works but is gonna be hard to remember and seems totally undocumented, and undiscoverable. Woul d really like Escape as many many other chat apps use that.

[keynlotepan]

It's not undocumented (in my German version v1.39.6).
It's listed as Hilfe/Tastaturbefehle anzeigen/Aktuelle Unterhaltung schließen (help/show shortcuts/close current conversation).
From my side the issue could be closed (or renamed/reopened as "close conversations with a more intuitive keyboard shortcut" or something like this)