Reply button click selects previous message instead of composing the reply

[csrpi]

Steps to reproduce

This is happening with one-line messages only. Messages that span more than one line in the room view don't manifest this bug.

When you want to reply to a single line message in a chat room, you follow these steps:

1. You hover the mouse cursor over the one-line message you want to reply to.
2. The badge with the React, Reply and Options buttons appears on the right side over the hovered message.
3. You then click on the React button.

Outcome

The expected outcome is that the the originally hovered message is selected as the message being replied to. Instead, what was happening, was that the previous message was selected and the click on the Reply button was just ignored.

Also, and more importantly, this bug was happening before I resized the chrome tab. When I did resized it, the bug stopped happening and I wasn't able to reproduce it anymore. So, there's that — it might just be a fluke...

Anyways, it's registered here ;)

Operating system

Linux, KDE Neon

Browser information

It's chrome. User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/94.0.4606.81 Safari/537.36

URL for webapp

app.element.io

Homeserver

matrix.org

Will you send logs?

No

[barathrm]

I get this (only) sometimes and it's quite annoying. If this is what I also experience, then the problem is that the reply button is just a tiny bit too far up, which means I can only barely (or not at all) hover over it to press it before the mouse moves to select/highlight the message above the message I wish to quote.

[germain-gg]

I have not been able to reproduce this issue so far.
Can you please let us know if this happens again?

@barathrm it appears that you're experiencing a different problem. That might be worth filing your own issue so that it can be tracked independently

[kittykat]

@csrpi As we cannot reproduce this issue, it would be helpful if you could provide a screen recording of it. Would you be able to do that? I use an application called OBS Studio for recording screencasts, but there are many others which work as well.

[Friskygote]

Hello!

I use Element Desktop in version 1.9.5 on Linux, KDE and wanted to report experiencing of this bug as well. Just yesterday I had it happen to me again which prompted me to search for this issue. It's been like that for a long time and it's not easily reproducible. I wish I had a video file showcasing it because I'm pretty sure I recorded one in the past and sent it to friends however that might just be lost in the messages so I'll try to provide as accurate text description of the problem.

• The problem arises only under specific circumstances considering the same message that exhibits this kind of behavior does not exhibit it after some time/changing from and back to that room.
• I believe barathrm's explanation is related to this issue and is the cause of the problem, I believe the bottom edge of message toolbox popup appears then on horizontal line with author's name instead of few pixel in the message content area however I don't have it recorded so sadly cannot prove that's correct
• I don't believe resizing window has anything to do with it

Assuming the following scenario:
There are 2 messages in the room, message A and after it message B
I want to reply to message B, I hover mouse pointer over message B and slowly move over to the reply button that appears above the message. When my mouse focuses on the reply button (or rather on the entire message toolbox that pops up above the message) there are 2-3 pixels above bottom corner where the popup shows correctly, however after these 2-3 pixels the toolbar disappears and appears over message A instead. Assuming mouse pointer is in the area of reply button and Left Mouse Button is used, it results in same behavior (focusing over message A instead of B).

Some settings that might be affecting this bug by shifting message height:

• Show typing notifications ON
• Use a more compact 'Modern' layout ON
• Enable experimental, compact IRC style layout OFF
• Show read receipts sent by other users OFF

I'll continue hunting for this to happen again and hopefully I'm able to record this problem.

[Friskygote]

Hello!

I were finally able to find a way to easily reproduce this issue on my environment which allowed me to record this behavior. I don't think that this is the only way to reproduce it, however it's an easy way to reproduce the same issue OP mentioned (not sure if the behavior I described is still reproducible however it's not shown on this video)
To reproduce

1. Send at least a couple of files that are not images in one room
2. Download one of the files, that should work correctly
3. When you come back to Element window from download file picker dialogue the behavior is now broken, you are unable to use message toolbar (each time it selects previous message, the picker dialogue is being clicked)
4. Switching window and coming back to Element somehow fixes the issue

Peek.2022-02-14.11-20.mp4