Pin conversations

[PhnorPhnar]

• [ x] I have searched open and closed issues for duplicates

Feature Request

The ability to pin conversations to the top of the list on the desktop app.

This might be a quick way of reproducing some of the benefits of 'channels' on other messaging services (e.g. Slack) without too much effort, and would make signal easier for business use.

p.s. I think the clock icon has disappeared from timed messages on the OSX desktop app with the latest update.

[scottnonnenberg]

You mean the hourglass icon? Or a different visual indicator for disappearing messages?

[PhnorPhnar]

I meant the little stopwatch (just above where it says "1 wk" etc.)... It has actually returned after I did a restart... The update this morning seemed to take 3 restarts to fully 'take', as it were.

[venkara]

When you've got 30-40 new and old conversations going on, it's hard to find the important ones easily. Pinning is very useful in this context.

[kevinjcliao]

@scottnonnenberg

I spent most of my afternoon poking around Signal-Desktop and want to try my hand at implementing this as I feel like this could be a fun side project. I'm going to try and flesh this out into a proper feature request.

Prior Art

WhatsApp currently lets users pin three conversations to the top. The remaining conversations are then sorted by most recent. Here's a photo from WhatsApp for Web.

Notice the little pin icon indicating that the conversation has been pinned.

There's a little context menu underneath each conversation in the conversation inbox that gives users a list of options. One of these is to pin the conversation.

Use Cases

Samuel is a community organizer. Samuel uses Signal to coordinate volunteers in his community. He's running hundreds of conversation threads with hundreds of different people, but the core group of organizers keep a chat. It would really benefit Samuel if he could ensure that the core organizer chat is not lost in a sea of threads between him and his volunteers. He decides to pin the core chat to the top of the app to ensure that it doesn't get lost. (After seeing community organizers use Signal in the wild, I'm convinced this is a real/important use case.)

The Proposal

Signal Desktop does not have a context menu underneath each conversation in the inbox, but there is a menu to the side. I propose that we add another item 'pin conversation' in that menu. Whether or not a conversation is pinned can be persisted in the prop for that conversation.

I can then modify the comparator function between conversations to prioritize pinned conversations above non-pinned conversations.

I would also need an icon that indicates that a conversation is pinned. I can try my hand at drawing one up, or see if I can find an open source icon somewhere.

Adding this to Signal for iOS or Android should not take too long either and we could add a 'pin option' in the conversation settings menu.

This, to me, sounds like a fun side project for me to hack away on and gain familiarity with the Signal code base while also being a pretty cool feature. If this sounds good, let me know and I can get cracking! :)

[scottnonnenberg-signal]

First, things have changed really radically in the beta branch (visually, architecturally). If you want to get involved in the development of the app, first I encourage you to install and use the beta. Install instructions are in the readme.

Second, Signal now has a UI designer, so we'll want to work with them before anything happens here. Check back when they are back from vacation in a couple weeks.

[GllsBe]

So has anybody been working on this since 2018?

[albatrossoff]

The same question. Hey, is there anybody out there?
It is very useful function and almost any messenger has it. "Pin", "Favorites", "Folders": any means to organize conversations. Folders with a small indicator that indicates the number of new messages would be even better solution in my opinion, in comparison to a simple "Pin" option. Because this way you may distinguish from you family, friends, work team and, let's say, different customers...
And put these folders on top of other contacts. Or on a horizontal bat and let users to scroll the list in case there would be too many folders. In the last case there would be very useful an additional indicator that shows the total number of new messages in all folders that stay behind the visible part of the folder bar.

[Trosterud]

+1 Being able to pin would be very useful. @kevinjcliao you have any updates?

[huehnerlady]

Any Updates on this? For Android this feature now exists0, just missing from desktop apps.
As a quick fix in my opinion would also be ok if you could just pin via phone, but that at least the pinned conversations are then also pinned in the desktop app. A menu entry like proposed earlier ist then the final part of this feature 🙂

[EvanHahn-Signal]

@huehnerlady No updates, but we'll let you know if that changes.

[EvanHahn-Signal]

You can now pin conversations from the Desktop app! I'm going to close this issue because I believe it's resolved.