Feature request: double-clicking a message should trigger a reply

[MenachemICTBIT]

Feature request for desktop client.

Double click on or near a received message should trigger 'Reply to Message" without having to Click the tiny ellipsis and select 'Reply to Message" option each time.

I'm willing to write this, if someone can point me in the right direction and it's not too difficult (I'm a junior dev).

[EvanHahn-Signal]

Thanks for reporting, and for offering to implement it!

I'm not sure if this is something we want to implement, as double-clicking can have other effects, such as highlighting text. I've set a reminder to ask our Design team next week to see what they think.

As an alternative in the meantime, you can Shift-Tab to the message and press Ctrl+Shift+R (or Cmd+Shift+R on macOS) which will trigger a reply. You can see other keyboard shortcuts with Ctrl+/ (or Cmd+/ on macOS).

Because we're not sure if we want to add this, please don't go implementing anything yet—we don't want to waste your time.

[MenachemICTBIT]

@EvanHahn-Signal

You can put a user-select: none on the parent div (class = module-timeline__message-container) and a user-select: text on the message module div (class = module-message).

I just tried it out in the dev console and it seems to work fine.

https://www.w3schools.com/cssref/css3_pr_user-select.asp

Edit: Respectfully, most non-tech people have no idea, nor the inclination to learn, hotkeys beyond CTRL+C, CTRL+C, CTRL+S. One of the tenants of good UX design is to make the product intuitive enough that the user doesn't need to think, or learn new skills (see Apple's "It just works").

[chiraag-nataraj]

One of the tenants of good UX design is to make the product intuitive enough that the user doesn't need to think, or learn new skills (see Apple's "It just works").

Right, but hovering next to the message already reveals a 'reply' arrow. I actually already find it more intuitive than, say, WhatsApp Web (where you have to hit the little arrow at the top of the message and then hit 'Reply').

[MenachemICTBIT]

Ahh. Perhaps I was using an older version without that feature? I hadn't noticed it, which is why I made this post. It must be so, since my initial complaint was having to click the ellipsis menu and select "reply". It must be a new version update.

[adioe3]

This would break existing ergonomics for selecting text: double clicking selects a word (or starts word-by-word selection if you hold and drag) and triple clicking selects a line of text. I'm sure there's others who, like me, rely on this for copy/pasting parts of messages (think passwords, etc.)

Adding a sudden "reply on double click" would be very annoying.