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Comment by koolala | Hacker News Reader

Zulip actually looks pretty good if they made it a little sexier.

my team tried it for a couple weeks. couldn't stand the threaded "only see what's important" style of chat. it's undoubtedly our least fav part of microsoft teams---the channels and the threads, we all operate in the chat tab and the channels tab has been relegated to announcement posts no one reads. huge shame zulip can't just like... have a toggle for normal chat chronology/presentation. some people have gone way too for trying to efficiency max or "cut out the noise" but chronological chat and a competent search feature will always be the goat.

> have a toggle for normal chat chronology/presentation

It does. https://zulip.com/help/general-chat-channels

But even without that, in a normal threaded channel, you can see all messages in all topics chronologically. IIRC that's the default view when you click a channel in the sidebar.

Here's an example: https://chat.zulip.org/#narrow/channel/138-user-questions the messages are grouped into runs of the same topic, but it's the whole channel.

mother of god. its perhaps time to revisit zulip. now if I could perhaps disable the topic group heading this would make perfect sense and effectively be a chatroom.

Yeah even as someone who prefers topics, I find the group header quite heavyweight.

Addendum: turns out, there is a design for lighter-weight headers, which I prefer. But they haven't gotten to it yet.

https://chat.zulip.org/#narrow/channel/101-design/topic/UI.2...

We've been using it successfully for a long time too. Real nice bunch of fellas. They did remove mobile notifications without a subscription recently and the price is quite high ONLY for notifications. I do not fault them for doing it but it made recommending them a tiny bit more difficult. The other major issues IMO are the super basic mobile client and lack of any kind of native voice/video chat. You get a button that provides a link to a chat service of your choice. For example you pick a Jitsi Meet instance and Zulip gives you button to create and share the url easily. That's it. I wish there were something a little better integrated.

I opened issues which were technically not feasile, it turns out. The server seems to do way too much logic to make this a better app, with offline first or even just "having a search that works" clients.

See also my and other users feedback about their UI in: Zulips values (24 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46953815

Zulip web is one of the best modern chat apps for intermittently offline use, and we put a lot of effort into making it that way.

For example, if you had it open on your laptop with a window open, suspend it, and open it up on a plane, you can read the last few weeks of message history, compose replies that will send when you regain network, etc. I do this regularly on flights.

We always have ideas for how to improve this further, and the mobile app doesn't do as extensive caching as the web app does, but it's not an issue of technical feasibility. The protocol was designed for mixed online/offline use from the beginning.

Sounds like it doesn't look good, then?

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