Archive Auth Entries

[dnut]

A user should be able to "archive" an entry from Ente Auth, which would hide it from the default view. They can view their archived entries in a separate view.

Why?

Most of the TOTP entries I have in Ente Auth are no longer used. I keep them however because I might need to login to that account again some day, but there's a good chance that I won't use it again within the next year. They clutter my view and make it harder to navigate my list of TOTP entries. I would like to hide all of these from view.

The only way to achieve this currently is with a whitelist-style approach, where you create a tag to represent the subset of entries you care about, and ensure every new entry is tagged with that tag. Then every time you open the app, you need to first select that tag before browsing the list. This is tedious and easy to forget about when adding new entries. A much better UX would be to simply archive an entry once, and then it stops showing up in the default view, which contains all unarchived entries.

Requirements

To conform with the UX most people would expect coming from other apps that support "archiving" of items, such as email frontends, the following requirements should be supported.

Strictly necessary:

1. TOTP entries can be easily archived or un-archived by tapping on a button that pops up after long-pressing the entry.
2. Archived items are automatically excluded from the default view you get when you open the app.
3. There is a separate view called "Archive" that shows all archived items.

Nice to have:

4. "Archive" is more than just a tag: archival gets first-class treatment as a distinct feature, with dedicated, hardcoded UI buttons. For example, when you select an item, there should always be an "archive" button in addition to the "add tag" button.
5. When you select a specific tag, the view includes both the unarchived and its archived items. (at least by default. This may be contentious and worth making configurable, or segregating the list so all the archived items come at the end, after a separator)

Should we also generalize for flexibility?

"Archive" could just be another tag (this does not conflict with requirement 4, as req 4 could be built on top of this). In that case, archival could be implemented by blacklisting the tag, whereby a view is modified to exclude entries with that tag, and the default view automatically enables a blacklist of the archive tag. This is unlike the current approach to tags, which only supports whitelisting (only show items from the selected tag).

The most flexible approach would go a step further and allow users to arbitrarily select multiple tags that they want to whitelist or blacklist, and the UI generates an aggregated/filtered view on the fly. I believe that this would be optimal, but it must be given a great deal of thought to ensure the UX is streamlined and not confusing.

[Techn1x]

I think this feature gets only more important as time goes on and people inevitably have more and more TOTP codes to manage.

Perhaps another easy approach to implementing this would be a blanket copy of the "Trash" code, since it's functionally the same thing but just different by name/use/definition.

(But I don't think we should expect users to use Trash for the purposes of Archiving because trash can sometimes imply that they will be cleaned up after 30 days. I know that's not the case here but it's common in other services.)

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And the obligatory +1, I have wanted a hide/archive feature for a while as well