Add keyboard shortcut to close the current conversation

[miterion]

I personally prefer to not have any conversation open if I am not currently chatting with a user or a room, since it might lead to accidental "reading" a message without me noticing it. Many messengers like telegram and Signal support this by allowing the user to close the current conversation and showing an empty panel instead. Element web does something similarly on the first login where it just shows a welcome screen. This PR adds a keyboard shortcut to trigger showing this welcome screen without needing to login again or manually navigating to the #/home page.

I chose the Ctrl+, here quite arbitrarily, feel free to change it to something different if you like.

The new shortcut in the overview:

[t3chguy]

Given Ctrl+. being right panel, Ctrl+, feels like it should be left Panel.

Chrome has Alt + Home for going Home, maybe that's a good convention

[miterion]

Given Ctrl+. being right panel, Ctrl+, feels like it should be left Panel.
Chrome has Alt + Home for going Home, maybe that's a good convention

I agree that , might be confusing for users, but overriding something like Alt+Home might break common usage patterns (I also do not have a home key on my thinkpad keyboard :/).
What do you think about a more complicated pattern like for example Ctrl + Shift + Q?

[orangecms]

How do you feel about Ctrl + W? It is common for closing the current tab in GUI apps.

[t3chguy]

I'd expect much smarter behaviour there then, where it closes the active modal first, if one is open otherwise "closes the room" (goes home)

[miterion]

I'd expect much smarter behaviour there then, where it closes the active modal first, if one is open otherwise "closes the room" (goes home)

I think that is a bit out of scope for my meager JavaScript knowledge. If you think that is necessary I would suggest that I close this PR and create an issue in the tracker.

[t3chguy]

Well if you want it to be Ctrl + W which is a very common close current thing then it has to be smarter
If you want something more akin to "Go Home" then that can be much simpler but shouldn't overload an existing competing keyboard shortcut

[miterion]

I changed it now to Ctrl+Alt+H which is not used afaik. Is that better in your opinion?

[t3chguy]

Much better, couple of nits:

On Mac Ctrl is rarely used, in that scenario Cmd should probably be used instead, we have CMD_OR_CTRL and other helpers for this.

The copy could probably be better as it'd apply to more than just conversations, e.g Community Views too. Should be more general, maybe being more about where you're going i.e Home.

[miterion]

On Mac Ctrl is rarely used, in that scenario Cmd should probably be used instead, we have CMD_OR_CTRL and other helpers for this.

Think I found a fix for that.

The copy could probably be better as it'd apply to more than just conversations, e.g Community Views too. Should be more general, maybe being more about where you're going i.e Home.

What do you mean by copy?

[t3chguy]

copy

Text - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copy_(written)

[miterion]

Text - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copy_(written)

Yeah, I could have guessed that 🤦

These are some suggestions from the top of my mind:

1. Open Home View/Page
2. Go to Home View

[t3chguy]

The latter seems sane to me

[t3chguy]

Needs DCO Sign-Off https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-js-sdk/blob/develop/CONTRIBUTING.rst#sign-off

[t3chguy]

Code wise it looks sane, I'd consider having it close all open Modal too otherwise the user might feel like its broken if they have Settings open

[turt2live]

just leaving a checkmark so github stops being confused and can instead be differently confused

[miterion]

Code wise it looks sane, I'd consider having it close all open Modal too otherwise the user might feel like its broken if they have Settings open

I added this feature in 40650bb but it only works after a user refocused the view (at least in my browser). This also happens with the Ctrl+/ shortcut, so it is not limited to my code.

was only a placeholder review

[turt2live]

@miterion in general, please avoid force-pushing as it makes review harder.

[miterion]

@miterion in general, please avoid force-pushing as it makes review harder.

Will do in the future, sorry for the fuss