True. The UI isn’t great though last I looked and is missing a lot of features. (I need to check again though, I heard it was upgraded?)
Here’s element for Matrix under Linux which is more my “ideal” client design.
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These full-screen clients are really a waste of screen space. We need a more compact client with a more window-based approach, that handles all protocols, like Adium does for macOS. I guess Renga is the closest best thing?
In my opinion, Haiku is old-school by design, IRC is old-school too, it make sense to me that they come together.
Perhaps you’re thinking of KDE’s Neochat?
While originally based on Spectre, it uses Quaternion’s
libquotient library for Matrix.
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I updated the recipe, the UI improves incrementally, but if you didn’t like the style then you probably won’t like it know.
Nheko runs fine for me for the most part (with e2ee too), except that the singleaplication stuff does not work properly on haiku, maybe someone can investigate that? (I have, but i havent figured out why, only that it is related to shared memory the posix way), I can package it if that is fixed.
the lib nheko uses, mtxclient, is supposed to just be a thin wrapper around http to give one matrix calls, I’ve been investigating the possibility of adding a BHttp backend (currently it is boost). I might use it as a basis for a native haiku matrix client at some point.
libquotient is tied to qt, we cant really use it for a native client, the last time i tried tp compile neochat it failed on some kde deps, I will try again today.
I really dislike the design of element personally, but i last used it years ago, so maybe their designers fixed stuff up by now.
I’m ok with some of the ui elements of Quaternion, most of my complaints are:
- UI elements look kind of scattered/random and like they don’t belong User icons shoved under timestamps without much design sense, etc.
- Lack of markdown rendering in chat
- room management stuff incomplete (though… maybe it’s better now?)
The Timeline layout has changed, that would be the first part.
Second point would be html rendering (not markdown) which is matrixs native formatting, which is supported.
Some stuff might be missing for point 3, not sure.
On another note, I managed to build and run neochat, it works yay, but not polished yet, I will start making a port.
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Sorry, missed all of this and so sorry if I backtrack a little… BeShare is basically a pub/sub system - the chat is just a node in the system, the share are more nodes. You could totally persist all of the chat and break it up in to channels, you just need to add in a bot that would serialize the data somewhere. The Muscle server is really quite flexible.
Client wise, I wrote an Object Pascal Client interface a loong time ago (I believe it’s still included by Jeremy … edit, yes it is) and there’s a C# one too. Writing the basic client is a few hundred lines of code, the file sharing is probably a little more involved. I think someone could write a .Net Core chat client in a few hours, and that would run on multiple platforms.
If someone wanted to be truly in control of the Haiku comms, it would be a good way to go and probably generate quite a useful set of apps. You could probably push the data to other services too without too much effort.
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How did you get the Haiku icons to show up? In my build it picks what looks like breeze icons.
You need qq2-deskotop-style for native look (I have the recipe ready, I’ll post it today)
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Ah, i had that compiled already, good to know
I would add to this that open-source, standardized solutions are better. You mention how things like Keybase can be bought by anyone, and I think that’s the only way to avoid it.
I’m going for something like this for Renga, but more compact to fit with the Haiku way of doing things. It means probably channel icons will not be visible in the channel list, or maybe shrunk to 16x16 icons.
There is still quite a lot of work to do to get it to do all the things I would like to, however (ability to share images, for example)
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Hey, did you post the recipe?
I’m still trying to figure out what the best way to report issues is for the qt port (since i am not on github). have two issues ready now anyhow
Using Telegram become even more difficult now. Desktop Telegram version without smartphone authorization is not supported anymore: https://github.com/telegramdesktop/tdesktop/issues/16153. I don’t have smartphone, I use regular mobile phone and PC-compatible Tablet PC instead.
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It’s unfortunate that chat clients along with their communication protocols are held ransom by a proprietary means (with the exception of Jabber and IRC). It was a lot better back in the old days of AIM, ICQ, etc. when any native chat client could be built to support the multitude of chat systems. Haiku should maybe champion one built on OSS and one that can go beyond just text messaging.
We have a working tox (qtox) client, seems to provide everything wanted. But i never used it myself as iam a IRC and Jabber oldie.
By the way, as Client i was big fan of the IM Kit back in the old days. I just love the idea to use People Files. No other system had something like this, it was spectacular (and sometimes a bit unstable 
).
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I remember trying it and not understanding how to actually use it and finding it very confusing.
The idea sounds nice at first, but it doesn’t work so well from an user point of view. Also, it only works for 1-to-1 chat, which I do very few of these days. The main use of IRC or XMPP in opensource software development is precisely the opposite: being able to communicate with a group of people who I have, for a large part, never met in real life, and who I don’t need private info about, nor want to share my private info with.
Sure, from todays perspective it had some design flaws, but i cant remember using group chats besides IRC and BeShare in that time. Someone had the plan to use Vision as the Chat Client for the Kit and implement new and fancy stuff, but it never happend and at some point many things where broken (at this point i switched to Romashka).
To make this working with todays standards you have to put a lot of work in it and redesign many parts (maybe almost everything) especially for group chats, voice calls, different media in the window etc.
But to have a folder with my “rooms/groups” could also be nice. 
So you speak about Vision?
Which Chat systems do you mean, sorry…