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Ticket #1325 (closed enhancement: wontfix)

Opened 5 years ago

Last modified 2 months ago

blist: add option to hide groups

Reported by:	Sim-on	Owned by:
Milestone:		Component:	pidgin (gtk)
Version:	2.0.1	Keywords:
Cc:	Tythsai, pajp, nomeata, ZuratonE, geertjan

Description

it would be nice if you can hide all groups... so that there are all buddys shwon and not sorted in their groups... i saw this at a friend on his normal icq

in the menu it coul be done like this:

Buddys -> Show/Hide Groups

Attachments

all_buddies_to_default_group.diff (1.0 kB) - added by terrex 2 months ago.: patch to make all contacts belonging to default group, hardcoded, there is no setting yet for this.

Change History

Changed 5 years ago by bernmeister

I would find this feature useful too. During the week I have a lot of contacts online (as they are at work and have internet access) and so groups makes sense.

But on the weekend (or evenings) most of the contacts are offline. It looks quite silly to have one contact per group showing. Basically it's a grey stripe and then white stripe (with cool green orb!) over and over. Makes me wanna have a seizure!

Also, I found this link: http://developer.pidgin.im/wiki/FinchFeat

Does this mean this ticket should remain open if it's planned to put in the hide/show groups option? Who is/was the author of that list of features?

BTW, love your work - Pidgin rules!

Changed 4 years ago by deryni

I am against this because of the confusion and complication it adds. The Add Buddy/Chat dialog includes a Group entry field, that field is already a cause of confusion to some people and will only be more so if they don't show groups at all. Not showing groups makes it even harder to deal with multiple duplicate buddies for the different accounts than it is now (and I am certain we will get people asking for the auto-contact dialog for buddies in the same groupless view as we have now for buddies in specific groups). Those are just to name a few, oh also, I don't think the default buddy list window which needs to Just Work is the place for things like this. I think a redesign of the buddy list window code to make replacing the buddy list view widget itself easier is and that then alternative buddy list implementations would be appropriate for things like this, for tag cloud views, etc.

Changed 3 years ago by bernmeister

I'm all for having the buddy list hide groups!

I did have an idea that extends beyond hiding the groups - sort of an auto-hide or "best fit". It would work like this:

1) Start Pidgin and it tries to show your buddy list with groups, online buddies and buddy details set.

2) If it can't fit all that in the buddy list without a scrollbar appearing, then it starts "gracefully degrading"...either hide groups and/or hide buddy details.

Would be nice too if I could specify how it degrades - what to show or not and in what order. Some users might have all buddies showing (online and offline) all the time; others only have online buddies showing.

The backend code would be challenging, but so too would be the UI to handle the above options. I'd jump in and have a crack, but I've not done C for 15 years and there's no Java API ;-)

Changed 3 years ago by deryni

At the moment pidgin cannot use GtkTreeModelFilter:s because they were added in GTK+ 2.4 and pidgin is committed to staying compatible with GTK+ 2.0 for the time being. They will become usable when pidgin releases version 3.0.0 as the plan is to increase our minimum required GTK+ version at that time.

That being said, it doesn't appear at first glance to require that much work to make the filters work once we can use them. It would seem that simply adding a row-visible column, wrapping the existing model in the filter model, and displaying the filter model instead of the existing model would work. (Ignoring all the code to actually toggle the visible column data as appropriate of course.)

A plugin could likely be written to try to do this at the moment as a proof-of-concept if nothing else.

Changed 3 years ago by sadrul

For the record, I would be OK with a patch that allows, for example, a plugin to decide which buddylist nodes (buddies, chats, contacts, groups) should be visible. That would allow a plugin to hide groups. It would also allow plugins to hide idle buddies, mobile buddies (#6807, #5876 etc.) etc.

I understand that there are complications that can come up with this (as deryni has pointed out), but maybe users complaining about this could be promptly directed to the 3rd-party plugin authors? ;)

Implementation-wise, it should be possible to do cleanly enough without polluting the current code (e.g. it could be similar to how it's done in finch and the 'Grouping' plugin).

follow-up: ↓ 30 Changed 2 years ago by jack5

the following use case shows why many people do need the ability to switch contact grouping off. if you have any idea, how the goals in the use case can be achieved without this functionality, tell me.

lets say you have like 5 groups with about 25 contacts in each. you have contacts from all over the world, so mostly there are about 4 or 5 contacts online in each group (that makes 20 all together), the rest is offline. now, of course you usually don't want to see all those offline contacts on top, so you order your contacts by offline/online status. only that wont help much, because now you really have to scroll a lot to see the online contacts in the lower groups. so you decide to disable groups, only you can't find an option in the menu. but you do find the option to hide offline groups, that does nearly the same for now: all your shiny green buddys on top and no disturbing gray offline contacts in between. right - until the moment you want to write a message to an offline buddy. you have to enable offline contacts, write him and disable them again. after a few times doing this you decide to search the menu for the possibility to disable groups again. after all pidgin is not your first instant messenger and you are familiar with this option from all the other messengers. after some time searching through the menus and preferences you decide to consult the internet. you are sure you must have overseen something, after all this is a helpful and quite common function. and because it is the only way you see how you can have both - offline contacts visible without spreading your online contacts all over the contact list - you invest quite some time looking for the missing function. only to find out, that developers decided not to implement it and even would reject implementations, not because of its difficulty or lack of time, no. because they, well don't want to.

the workaround commonly posted in the internet, "move all your contacts in one group" does not help. after all, the group is an indicator for you to remember who the person behind the alias is. and of course you don't want to lose this information.

any idea how to solve this problem?

Changed 18 months ago by gweilo8888

I'm a new Pidgin user, and I'm likewise considering ditching the program in favor of another due to this decision. The inability to hide groups, and to arrange all contacts without regard to their messenger service, is the one big failing in an otherwise clean and approachable interface.

"It adds complexity" is not a reasonable excuse as to why the feature won't be included. If it's felt to be overly complex, it could easily be added as a non-default setting, and if necessary a warning shown before the user is allowed to enable it. Hence, zero complexity need be added for any user who doesn't understand the feature.

It's also perfectly possible to tie it to the "show protocol icons" feature, so that if you hide the groups, you *have* to instead show the protocol icons (or at least, the default is to do so, and you have to disable the icons if you don't want them).

With the icons shown, there's absolutely no possibility of confusing identically named contacts from different networks, even without separate groups.

I really hope this decision will be reconsidered, given that a significant portion of the user base wants this feature.

in reply to: ↑ 36 Changed 18 months ago by tof

That's exactly what people are doing, finding another IM application. If one day you'll ever wonder why the use base is shrinking, I think we did give you a clue. Regards.

Replying to rekkanoryo:

The decision will not be reconsidered. The complexity being referred to is that it adds a completely unreasonable and therefore unacceptable complexity to the code, not to anything the user sees. A number of developers have expressed willingness to consider specific solutions that allow plugins to hack such a feature in--that's as far as we're willing to go. If people don't like our decisions about what will or will not be done to Pidgin, they are free to find another application.

in reply to: ↑ 36 ; follow-up: ↓ 42 Changed 18 months ago by gweilo8888

Replying to rekkanoryo:

The complexity being referred to is that it adds a completely unreasonable and therefore unacceptable complexity to the code, not to anything the user sees.

If that's the case, then why did you previously say:

"It doesn't matter how hard it is to implement--we've made it clear we have no intention of doing so, and I'll go on the record now saying if anyone writes a patch to make it happen, it will be rejected. We do not want such a feature in Pidgin."

That implies this has nothing to do with complexity, but rather that you've made a personal decision you don't want the feature, and hence are closed-minded towards the possibility that anybody else might want it.

That's your right, but when users are told their needs and opinions are a secondary consideration, that's a pretty good impetus to go elsewhere.

in reply to: ↑ 37 ; follow-up: ↓ 41 Changed 18 months ago by gweilo8888

Replying to deryni:

It should also be pointed out that you can currently position buddies regardless of their protocol/account connection. What you cannot do is position them ignoring their group connection because groups are intended to be meaningful things.

Sorry, can you please explain how I can "position buddies regardless of protocol", when each protocol has its own separate groups? As far as I can see, the inability to hide the groups makes it completely impossible to position buddies without regard to protocol -- which is the crux of the whole problem.

in reply to: ↑ 40 ; follow-up: ↓ 44 Changed 18 months ago by rekkanoryo

Replying to gweilo8888:

Sorry, can you please explain how I can "position buddies regardless of protocol", when each protocol has its own separate groups? As far as I can see, the inability to hide the groups makes it completely impossible to position buddies without regard to protocol -- which is the crux of the whole problem.

In Pidgin, groups are global. If you move buddies around, groups will be created on the appropriate servers as necessary.

in reply to: ↑ 39 Changed 18 months ago by rekkanoryo

Replying to gweilo8888: <snip>

If that's the case, then why did you previously say:

<snip>

That implies this has nothing to do with complexity, but rather that you've made a personal decision you don't want the feature, and hence are closed-minded towards the possibility that anybody else might want it.

Both statements are true. Options have a ridiculously high complexity and maintenance cost, therefore we don't want to implement them unless we feel it's absolutely necessary to do so (which is not the case here).

That's your right, but when users are told their needs and opinions are a secondary consideration, that's a pretty good impetus to go elsewhere.

And that's perfectly acceptable to us. We're not out to win popularity contests or such. We're out to develop an IM client we like.

Changed 18 months ago by TeejMonster

It's a pretty hard slap in the face to have a feature that people obviously care about ignored when it is very technically feasible to implement. The decision to exclude this feature (and many others which people requested) was completely arbitrary. I struggle to accept that you can add video chat support but you can't add the option to hide groups.

If you're only out to develop a client you like, then you're well on your way. I personally feel alienated by the notion that the devs are building this for themselves only. A community seems redundant if no amount of support can push a feature through unless a dev already wanted it in.

in reply to: ↑ 41 Changed 18 months ago by gweilo8888

Replying to rekkanoryo:

Replying to gweilo8888:

Sorry, can you please explain how I can "position buddies regardless of protocol", when each protocol has its own separate groups? As far as I can see, the inability to hide the groups makes it completely impossible to position buddies without regard to protocol -- which is the crux of the whole problem.

In Pidgin, groups are global. If you move buddies around, groups will be created on the appropriate servers as necessary.

I'm sorry, but obviously one of us is not understanding the other, and I frankly don't know who.

Pretend I'm thick for a minute, and explain to me how I can position two Yahoo buddies in my buddies list from my single Yahoo account, with a single Google Chat buddy in between them.

That's what you implied that you can do, when you said that you can "position buddies regardless of their protocol/account connection"

If you can't explain how to do that, then your previous statement was misleading, because buddy positioning is limited by protocol / account connection, and cannot be changed regardless of this.

If your comment was accurate and you *can* explain how to do it though, then there are going to be a number of happy people in this thread, me included.

follow-ups: ↓ 47 ↓ 48 Changed 18 months ago by Mishtal

In your buddylist window click on the Buddies menu. Choose Sort Buddies. Choose Sort Manually.

In your buddy list window, click on a buddy, and drag him/her to the location desired.

For instance, I use Add Group from the buddies menu, and then click and drag one at a time both Yahoo buddies, and then my Google Talk buddy into my newly created group. Once they are in the group, I click and drag my Google Talk buddy to a position between my two yahoo buddies.

This gives you a single group with buddies from multiple protocols.

You can also choose to merge buddies into a single contact. For instance, I have a buddy named Bob who has accounts on AIM, MSN, GTalk, Yahoo, and my XMPP server. On my buddy list, he shows up as a single account, and not all of his various accounts.

in reply to: ↑ 46 ; follow-up: ↓ 49 Changed 17 months ago by gweilo8888

Replying to Mishtal:

In your buddylist window click on the Buddies menu. Choose Sort Buddies. Choose Sort Manually. In your buddy list window, click on a buddy, and drag him/her to the location desired. This gives you a single group with buddies from multiple protocols.

Thank you *so* much, Mishtal. So it seems that what some (if not many) of us were asking for was possible all along. Thanks to your detailed answer, I've now removed the grouping (well -- other than Non-IM Contacts and Other Contacts, which reappear if I delete them, but I can just hide those empty groups) from my own Pidgin install, and resolved the biggest issue I had with the program. I just didn't understand the program's UI well enough to start with, it seems.

You can also choose to merge buddies into a single contact. For instance, I have a buddy named Bob who has accounts on AIM, MSN, GTalk, Yahoo, and my XMPP server. On my buddy list, he shows up as a single account, and not all of his various accounts.

I'd love to do this too, but can't see where I'd do it. Don't see a merge option in any of the menus, nor from right-clicking on a single contact. Tried selecting multiple contacts at once in case it was done that way, and that's not possible either. I'm in Pidgin 2.7.5 on Windows -- if it's possible in that version, I'd be grateful if you could guide me to the option I'm missing again please. :)

Once merged, is there a way to specify the priority of messaging services that should be used when contacting an individual who's on multiple services simultaneously?

in reply to: ↑ 47 Changed 16 months ago by Mishtal

Replying to gweilo8888:

You can also choose to merge buddies into a single contact. For instance, I have a buddy named Bob who has accounts on AIM, MSN, GTalk, Yahoo, and my XMPP server. On my buddy list, he shows up as a single account, and not all of his various accounts.

I'd love to do this too, but can't see where I'd do it. Don't see a merge option in any of the menus, nor from right-clicking on a single contact. Tried selecting multiple contacts at once in case it was done that way, and that's not possible either. I'm in Pidgin 2.7.5 on Windows -- if it's possible in that version, I'd be grateful if you could guide me to the option I'm missing again please. :) Once merged, is there a way to specify the priority of messaging services that should be used when contacting an individual who's on multiple services simultaneously?

@gweilo8888

Sorry, I saw your reply when you wrote it, and intended to respond, but got swamped at work and forgot.

The way you merge several accounts from arbitrary networks isn't intuitive.

You have to click and drag one account and hold / hover the dragged account over the account that you want to merge it into. The account you are hovering over will expand to show all contacts that are in that "buddy". If you release the account you are dragging at that time, it will be merged into the buddy. You can merge as many accounts into a single buddy as you want. I myself have a buddy with 5 different accounts, some on the same network. I'm sure that its feasible to have more.

Pidgin automatically chooses from the accounts that that buddy has that are online. Further, if during a conversation, the buddy signs out of the account you are currently chatting with, pidgin will auto switch seamlessly. In fact, this sometimes makes for some amusing conversations, where your friend maybe switches computers without telling you, and wonders how you didn't notice. That sort of thing. You can manually switch which account you are talking to by using the "Send To" menu item inside of your conversation.

I am not positive on how to manually specify the order. I've never bothered with it. I assume that you can do this by right clicking on the buddy, hitting "expand", and then clicking and dragging the order. Most likely farther up means higher priority.

Once you've merged the buddy's different accounts, you can right click and assign an alias to the entire stack. For example, my friend with 5 different accounts has a different account name on each network. But when I talk to him, I only see "Bob Smith". It never occurs to me that he might be using network X today, as I only see the nickname I give him.

@geertjan

If you want to have the ability to globally enable and disable groups, I can't help you. But you could just drag all of your buddies into a single group. It isn't exactly the solution everyone (Including myself) wants, but for the most part it provides a similar result.

follow-up: ↓ 51 Changed 9 months ago by tylerszabo

I request that this position be re-evaluated due to Bug #9076.

My use case: I have contacts on Gtalk, Facebook, and MSN (unfortunately). I would like to just have them all displayed as online/offline (since I have a lot of Facebook groupings).

With Pidgin's current behavior if I attempt to regroup them (overriding the server's organization) upon restart everyone will return to their respective groups.

Thus between this bug, and #9076 there's a problem: I can't group my contacts the way I want to, and now I need to look at a page of group names, rather than contacts.

Please stop saying you're making this decision to improve usability: you have no evidence of that. Also, please do not tell me this is Facebook/Google's bug, because it's not. It's yours.

in reply to: ↑ 50 Changed 9 months ago by goshuar

I have a similar problem to tylerszabo. I haven't used pidgin in a long time, and last time I did I had deleted all my groups to keep my contacts together, however, I now use Facebook chat to communicate with my friends, and because I use groups to control my privacy settings, I cannot, for practical reasons, delete them all. I only downloaded Pidgin yesterday, but because of this I'm going to have to find an alternative, which sucks because Prepaid 3G data is quite expensive in Aus, and except for this issue, Pidgin is perfect. I'll be keeping an eye on this page, hopefully somebody with the necessary skills decides to do something about this...

Changed 4 months ago by M5J5

Won't-fixing this is a nonsense. Implement this please.

1) That's not a hard one.

2) What's the point of having a universal IM client when you still have group separations you can't get rid of (Facebook, I'm looking at you).

3) Everyone who doesn't want to endlessly manage their contacts wants that, don't they?

4) It would please us very much. See the votes? See the comments? There's just a very small part of users who actually get to the point of involvement (the lowest there is, I agree) of reporting and commenting on bugs. Multiply this by 100 or 1000 and that's the number of users which would use this feature.

5) That's not a hard one. Gain/Effort approaches infinity on this one.

in reply to: ↑ description Changed 4 months ago by werdnanoslen

Recently fully switched from mac to arch, so I can no longer use adium, a beautiful and highly configurable im client. I'm quite surprised that both empathy and pidgin don't have the ability to just have a plain list of contacts. I like my always-open programs like IM/cloud storage/music to be minimal, you see, and with adium I could simply hide the navbar and ALL buttons, make the background transparent, and tell it to only show itself if I hovered over a corner of the screen. The contacts' names (just text) were the only things visible, not even groups. I know who they all are, and I don't care if they're "Buddies," "Contacts," or whatever other seemingly arbitrary grouping function tells me my friends belong under.

Someone please provide an *option* to simply list all contacts without groups.

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Ticket #1325 (closed enhancement: wontfix)

blist: add option to hide groups

Description

Attachments

Change History

Changed 5 years ago by lithium

Changed 5 years ago by zrebec

Changed 5 years ago by subtlecoolness

Changed 5 years ago by lschiere

Changed 5 years ago by lithium

Changed 5 years ago by bernmeister

Changed 5 years ago by Franzman

Changed 4 years ago by Sim-on

Changed 4 years ago by deryni

Changed 4 years ago by cmr

Changed 4 years ago by Tythsai

Changed 3 years ago by datallah

follow-up: ↓ 18 Changed 3 years ago by johnu

Changed 3 years ago by bernmeister

Changed 3 years ago by deryni

Changed 3 years ago by deryni

Changed 3 years ago by bernmeister

in reply to: ↑ 13 Changed 3 years ago by bernmeister

Changed 3 years ago by TeejMonster

Changed 3 years ago by nomeata

Changed 3 years ago by datallah

Changed 3 years ago by ciki62

Changed 3 years ago by rekkanoryo

Changed 3 years ago by Tythsai

Changed 3 years ago by rekkanoryo

Changed 3 years ago by rekkanoryo

Changed 3 years ago by sadrul

Changed 3 years ago by deryni

follow-up: ↓ 30 Changed 2 years ago by jack5

in reply to: ↑ 29 Changed 2 years ago by ZuratonE

Changed 2 years ago by spangaer

Changed 23 months ago by kexik

Changed 20 months ago by tof

Changed 19 months ago by mpoiu

Changed 18 months ago by gweilo8888

follow-ups: ↓ 38 ↓ 39 Changed 18 months ago by rekkanoryo

follow-up: ↓ 40 Changed 18 months ago by deryni

in reply to: ↑ 36 Changed 18 months ago by tof

in reply to: ↑ 36 ; follow-up: ↓ 42 Changed 18 months ago by gweilo8888

in reply to: ↑ 37 ; follow-up: ↓ 41 Changed 18 months ago by gweilo8888

in reply to: ↑ 40 ; follow-up: ↓ 44 Changed 18 months ago by rekkanoryo

in reply to: ↑ 39 Changed 18 months ago by rekkanoryo

Changed 18 months ago by TeejMonster

in reply to: ↑ 41 Changed 18 months ago by gweilo8888

Changed 18 months ago by gweilo8888

follow-ups: ↓ 47 ↓ 48 Changed 18 months ago by Mishtal

in reply to: ↑ 46 ; follow-up: ↓ 49 Changed 17 months ago by gweilo8888

in reply to: ↑ 46 Changed 16 months ago by geertjan

in reply to: ↑ 47 Changed 16 months ago by Mishtal

follow-up: ↓ 51 Changed 9 months ago by tylerszabo

in reply to: ↑ 50 Changed 9 months ago by goshuar

Changed 6 months ago by Slugkid

Changed 5 months ago by kurtopia

Changed 4 months ago by podaa

Changed 4 months ago by M5J5

in reply to: ↑ description Changed 4 months ago by werdnanoslen

Changed 2 months ago by terrex

Changed 2 months ago by terrex

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