Autoscroll makes it impossible to read history

[ViRb3]

We need a way to disable this feature - it is impossible to read history in an active conversation, as it will force your view to the bottom on every new message.

[dusansimic]

@sindresorhus I agree. I could make an option to disable auto-scroll and add a key-binding so it's faster to enable/disable it.

[sindresorhus]

Why an option though? It seems like good default behavior to only auto-scroll if the scroll position is already at the bottom. Imagine if your email app suddenly scrolled to the top every time you got a new email, even though you had it scrolled far down looking for something.

[dusansimic]

That's a good point. I could write a PR to implement that.

[dusansimic]

It seems like messenger.com already has that behavior. When a message is received and user is at the bottom of the chat, chat scrolls into view of the last received message. when user has scrolled up so last message can't be seen, on new message the chat doesn't scroll and stays where it is. As I understand this is the requested behavior by this issue. The autoscroll fix was actually adding autoscroll on new message even if user has scrolled up. I do experience an occasional bug that chat doesn't scroll when I open a new conversation so we can leave that in but to me it seems like the autoscroll fix actually broke the expected behavior.

[czerwinski76]

I hope this auto scroll will desepear soon in v2.49.

[dusansimic]

I'd like to correct my observation in my previous comment. When a new message is received in the chat, chat scrolls down by the height of the received message or some other object. So when user is at the bottom of chat, chat gets scrolled down to bottom again but when the user has scrolled up so the bottom of the chat can't be seen, chat still scrolls down but not to the bottom but by height of the received message. This the autoscroll feature is actually not needed but we could try to prevent the auto scroll if user has scrolled up.

Ping @sindresorhus. I'd like to fix this, what is your opinion on this?

[AggelosM]

This is really annoying, it's impossible to read past messages on an active conversation :(

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Caprine 2.50.0 Electron 10.1.1 win32 10.0.19041 Locale: en-US

[dusansimic]

@AggelosM sorry about the inconvenience. I know that this issue has been open for quite some time, it's been bugging me too. Right now I can only imagine under how much pressure and stress @sindresorhus is because of Hacktoberfest so I'd really be glad if we could give him a bit of time to handle everything else he's working on which is a lot of stuff. When this wave of pull requests is over I hope Sindre will have more free time for this so we could close this issue.