RightPanel should remember thread panel width separately

[ara4n]

Your use case

What would you like to do?

It makes no sense that RightPanel remembers what it's displaying per room (ThreadPanel, MemberList, etc)... but doesn't remember how wide it should be. Therefore, as well as remembering contents, it should remember width too.

Why would you like to do it?

When viewing a room with threads, i find you rapidly expand the RightPanel as wide as possible so the ThreadPanel contents is legible. If you then switch to a room without threads, you're more likely to find the MemberList or similar open (or the RightPanel hidden entirely) - so it's very disturbing and unergonomic if the RightPanel is now sized to be 50% of the width of the screen.

Have you considered any alternatives?

The popping of the RightPanel width as you change rooms could be a bit annoying, but given the RightPanel is 'owned' by the room in the information hierarchy, i think it's acceptable.

Additional context

I've now resized by RightPanel about 200 times today, and i wish i hadn't had to.

[bmarty]

Alternatively, can the application use and save a different width for the thread panel and for the room detail panel?

[americanrefugee]

Picking up the conversation since I've been working on the new sidebar designs for Element X Web (design file) (prototype).

My thoughts...

• For now, the sidebar width for Threads should be adjustable and then stay fixed at that size for all rooms
• All other views (about, people, profile, etc) should remain a fixed size (like they are now in the new design)
• In the future, perhaps clicking a thread from the list of all threads changes the Timeline view instead of the sidebar view

WDYT?

[janogarcia]

If we store the right panel width strictly per room, then we're probably going to make the matter worse for most users, as in being extremely frustrated for not being able to resize it once and get the same layout everywhere.

I would vote for either having a default width value that works best for all scenarios and, if that's not possible, then store a separate value for the outlier (threads).

So, we would have, at most, two values:

• global right sidebar width: the default used for panels
• global right sidebar width for threads: the width used for the thread panel

Ideally, it should be just one value (e.g., Slack), but some examples out there opt to have separate values (e.g., Discord). We can explore all that as part of the ongoing redesign of the right sidebar.

[janogarcia]

@americanrefugee It seems we mostly agree on how to approach it.

In the future, perhaps clicking a thread from the list of all threads changes the Timeline view instead of the sidebar view

Threads being more blocking (temporarily obscuring the main timeline) could potentially disrupt the workflow for most people. It would be nice to have it as an alternate view, though (actually did some explorations on that view when working on threads).

[ara4n]

that sounds fine to me; so we only see pops when moving between rooms with threads open and not-open.

[janogarcia]

@nadonomy We all seem to be mostly on the same page, so we'll explore what's shared above as part of the current sidebar redesign effort.