I wish there was a good high density client for matrix. Like an IRC client.
All the ones I've seen emulate Whatsapp and signal. Big avatars, lots of spacing everywhere. This doesn't work well if you bridge lots of other networks with many channels. Discord, slacks etc.
For now I still bridge that kind of network to IRC, and I use matrix just for my personal chats. Because there's just no good client that doesn't become a huge mess with that many channels open.
Desktop Element's interface is also awkward for some of us who don't use many channels but simply need our screen space for other things.
Even in compact layout, with small fonts, with one sidebar hidden and the other in icons-only mode, it manages to make a 600-pixel-wide window feel cramped. About half of that width is filled with icons and empty space. The settings panel doesn't even fit in that size.
The jabber clients I used in the past were comfortable at a fraction of that size. I think part of that was because they didn't force everything (e.g. contact lists and conversations) into a single window, and part of it was that they didn't flood the display area with margins, oversized (often repeating) icons, and space reserved for unimportant things that in some rooms will never appear.
I tolerate the interface because I love what the network is accomplishing and I haven't found an alternative client that seems better overall. I might try Nheko if/when its e2ee matures.
One of the things I miss most in modern chat clients is the old MDI style interface where each channel could have its own sub window, allowing for tiling and repositioning of multiple chat contexts at once. I know weechat and some others have similar capabilities, but I'm thinking more like mIRC. This complaint extends to a lot of modern software, tbh.
Hydrogen[1] allows you to have multiple opened conversations, but it isn't super flexible. NeoChat has nice feature for this too, as someone else mentioned.
Right now its really hard for alternative clients to support E2E because they are forced to build the whole encryption stack up.
As a consequence the alternative clients have just not matured and have mostly lost steam.
The next gen of matrix mainline will be moving to a Rust based library stack that has an explicit goal of making straight forward bindings for 3rd party clients via a mostly standard C library interface (so yay for elisp, python, c++ etc) and of course the Rust libraries can be deployed to wasm for web and javascript.
I think we'll get a lot more mature clients that will be more useful, because yeah... the current matrix mainline client has "modern" disease pretty bad.
Terminal clients like weechat[1] might catch your attention, but I'm pretty sure what you're looking for just doesn't match up with modern UI conventions.
I can also personally vouch for weechat, it's extremely customizable and fun to use.
I don't think it's a matter of ui convention. Doing things the Whatsapp way does not work for such large amounts of chat channels. They're just doing it because people are used to it..
I think there's 2 kinds of usecases for matrix. One tries to just replace Whatsapp etc as a person to person chat network. It aims mainly at novice users. The other usecase tries to bridge as many chats into it as possible to have a central place of interaction. This is obviously for more advanced users. Still, the element team seems to aim for this usecase too with their Element One service.
The ui of element and the other high profile clients works great for the former but poorly for the latter.
I use gomuks by the way but I would like to see images (with a click if needed). Gomuks actually shows them but very low res.
I tried it when it first came to Elements but I didn't manage to set it up so that stuff from each bridge went into its own space. It seems to be more something for matrix communities on the wider network, not for local bridges. Perhaps it's improved now but it didn't work for me when I last tried it.
I should give it another try though. I'd kind of forgotten about it because after the first try I've hidden the entire vertical bar for it, to reclaim some screen space. So I haven't given it any thought lately.
It goes for nearly every team/chat application nowadays the information density is just too low. Webex is the worst offender if you have a thread in a channel it's basically unusable.
Good point but I don't really care about E2EE for my usecase. I mainly use it for my local bridges and my Matrix instance isn't even publicly accessible or linked to the rest of the matrix network. So for my use it really doesn't matter.
I think Nheko suffers from low-density UI the same as Element. Especially the room list. But unlike Element it does support tags properly which is indeed great.
A PR was merged recently to make reading encrypted messages in libquotient (the lib used by both Quatermion and NeoChat). Another one is in the work to send encrypted messages.
Yeah I know but the messages are exactly the part where I don't really need it. It's the channel list that becomes a mess.
It could really do with threaded channel lists too, so I can have my slack groups and discord servers with their channels underneath without bunching them all together without any organization.
Yeah I looked at spaces but it didn't seem to work for me. I couldn't set it up with my local bridges the way I want. And I don't want to micromanage everything.
The old tags worked very well for this but the problem is that element shows each tag as its own independently scrolling list. So if you have many of them you have lots of tiny scroll zones. That doesn't work at all. Also they seem to be wanting to deprecate tags, most of the management features have been removed from element.
Not an issue of spaces per se but with >1000 rooms/DMs, the Element Desktop UI can become very unresponsive, to the point of being barely usable, and sometimes freezes completely requiring killing the process. I haven't pinpointed the exact condition(s) that makes it freeze up/get very sluggish but even on good days it takes >5s to expand the "People" list.
This is on a modern desktop CPU with plenty of memory headroom. It never happened so far on a profile with less chats.
I hope that will improve when they switch out the Matrix implementation from JS to Rust, especially for the desktop version. (which is planned, I think)
When I tried it (when it had just freshly come out) I wasn't able to group channels of each bridge in their own space. Perhaps that's changed now as I hid the whole spaces tab when I first tried it and didn't try it again.
Tbh tags were fine, it was just the whole UI around it in Element that was just totally screwy. But the concept itself works ok (though I missed the ability to auto assign them based on the bridge).
I already achieve that by creating my own private spaces, where I distribute the rooms I am in as I see fit. Plus, I join the spaces of whatever topic I want to, too.
All the ones I've seen emulate Whatsapp and signal. Big avatars, lots of spacing everywhere. This doesn't work well if you bridge lots of other networks with many channels. Discord, slacks etc.
For now I still bridge that kind of network to IRC, and I use matrix just for my personal chats. Because there's just no good client that doesn't become a huge mess with that many channels open.