feature request: unread messages view

[penCsharpener]

This flows out of topic home narrow concise view

scenario: When coming back to the chat with over 100 missed message. I usually don't mute topics as they are created to frequently to keep up with muting.
So I thought an alternative home view might be useful that groups all the topics together in home with an indication how many messages in it I have missed and marks topics that mention me in red or uncollapses that particular message.
It would look something like this...

@timabbott refined the idea to be

an "unread messages" view that would go between "Private messages" and "starred messages".

[zulipbot]

Hello @zulip/server-sidebars members, this issue was labeled with the area: left-sidebar label, so you may want to check it out!

[timabbott]

I think this could be a great project to work on! Probably a project for a relatively advanced programmer.

We have all the data already present in the frontend, and with some refactoring, I don't think the CSS would be too hard to implement.

Implementation-wise, I think we could implement this as a narrow, using a flag on the message_list object to control the fact that we're only displaying recipient bars, not messages, which will result in a bunch of little tweaks being needed.

[showell]

If anybody claims this, we should discuss the design. I like Tim's idea of making this work like a narrow in some ways--it's more expedient and fits in with the message pane paradigm. But I honestly believe this feature will be extended in ways beyond a typical narrow, so I'd be more inclined to use a popup, or at least a more tabular presentation.

[MasonProtter]

I'd just like to bump this and note that it was recently requested in the Julialang Zulip.

[MasonProtter]

I appears that searching streams:public is:unread does the trick, though reading those messages from the search does not appear to mark them as read.

[showell]

Hrm, the fact that we don't treat streams:public is:unread as a stream where you can read messages (and have them marked as read) is an interesting edge case--I guess there's a pretty strong argument we should mark those as read.

[mojavelinux]

What brought me to this issue is that when I click on a stream to see what topics have activity, the unread count gets cleared both on the stream and the topics with the unread messages. So I no longer know which topics had unread messages. The bigger drawback, though, is that I'm then channeled into addressing all the topics with activity right then and there instead of being able to visit them when I'm ready to address them.

One of the things I really like about Zulip is being able to read the messages in stages instead of the drink from the firehose scenario of most other chat platforms. And yet, I'm losing that ability in this scenario.

Should this clearing of the unread count on the stream and topics be handled in a separate issue? I'm looking for a "peek" mode for a stream so I can open it to see what topics I want to visit without visiting the stream itself. Or is this all related to the unread message view?

[mojavelinux]

I want to clarify that clicking on the stream does not, in fact, clear the unread count entirely. It seems to focus the first unread message and decrement the count on the stream and topic by 1. If there's only 1 unread message, it just appears as though it's clearing the unread count entirely.

[timabbott]

@mojavelinux that issue is something we consider extremely important, and will be addressing soon. The issue for tracking it is #10886.

One can get something reasonable for this use case by using "Recent topics" with the "Unread" filter enabled.

[mojavelinux]

@timabbott I use that exact workflow daily. But I still have paranoia about clicking on a stream before I'm ready because it immediately changes my unread count. Sometimes, it just happens because I have a brain lapse and click before thinking. I have trained myself to always go through the Recent topics view, but sometimes I slip up ;)