Add support for mentioning users in WhatsApp group chats

[Prakhil-tp]

I'd like to request a feature for Whatsapp integration: The ability to mention users in group chats, similar to how it works in the official whatsapp app.

Why it is useful?

• Mentions help direct attention to specific users in busy group chats.

Thank you for your great work!

[d99kris]

Thanks for the positive feedback! Will look into this.
Note to self: Related to #117

[YusufGandhi]

Thanks @d99kris for the amazing WhatsApp client. This truly helps me with my conquest of digital minimalism since I have to use it heavily for work.

Just wondering if there's an update re: this support, since I am in a lot of WhatsApp groups for work related stuff? The ability to mention other people will definitely help my work.

And also one more thing, I observe that when people are mentioned, instead of their name handlers displayed, it is their ID (WhatsApp ID?). Please refer to the screenshot below.

Is it something that expected or I misconfigured it? Tried to search for the answer in issues, but I couldn't find anything.

Thanks again for your marvelous work!

[YusufGandhi]

Oh thank you for your response!

I really hope my cpp skill is not this rusty, so I could contribute and open PR, instead of merely requesting features 😞

Thanks again and looking forward to the updates!

[d99kris]

Hi again - a fix for displaying mentions/tags on WhatsApp for the new LID user ids has been committed in c06b3bd, so it should fix the issue you were seeing.

Other mentions functionality is not implemented yet though.

[YusufGandhi]

Hi @d99kris,

Oh, thank you so much! How can I install the new version? In the new PR I can see the version is 5.11.31, but the official latest release on Github is still 5.10.15, the same as in Homebrew, from which I installed nchat:

$ brew info nchat           
==> d99kris/nchat/nchat: stable 5.10.15
Terminal-based Telegram / WhatsApp client
https://github.com/d99kris/nchat

[d99kris]

Assuming you wish to continue to use homebrew for updating nchat, you will need to wait until the next stable release (target is by Nov 16th). nchat is using a time-based release cycle (twice per quarter).

The alternative is to uninstall from homebrew, and install from source code. Something like this:

brew uninstall nchat
git clone https://github.com/d99kris/nchat && cd nchat
./make.sh deps
./make.sh build && ./make.sh install

Then for future updates you would need to go to the source directory, update from git and do the build steps again, i.e.:

cd nchat
git pull
./make.sh build && ./make.sh install

[YusufGandhi]

awesome! I have installed the new version manually. Smooth experience! Now I can see the name handler. Looking forward to #117 implementation!

[gabrieltomasin]

This would be great! Would you mind creating an issue for this?

Can't promise anything but I might be able to work on it on my free time.

[d99kris]

This would be great! Would you mind creating an issue for this?

This project generally uses issues for bugs and discussions for feature requests. When a new feature PR is ready to be merged I typically create an issue (from the discussion) just prior to merging (as github commit messages cannot reference discussions). But it's only after ui/behavior/functionality has been agreed upon and a PR has passed reviews, so I cannot create an issue at this point.

Can't promise anything but I might be able to work on it on my free time.

That would be a welcome help! 👍 Btw, note that nchat supports whatsapp and telegram, and I should mention that there are some more whatsapp LID handling fixes in the pipeline, hoping to get them in this weekend. After that it's probably a more stable base to work from.

[gabrieltomasin]

This project generally uses issues for bugs and discussions for feature requests

Now I got it! I'm not completely used to Open Source collaboration, so the misunderstanding is probably on my end. But I think the contribution guidelines (as of v5.11.32) could be a bit misleading, as it does not mention the discussion section. Again, the misunderstanding is probably on my end anyway.

I'll keep an eye on the repo and wait for these LID handling fixes first while I try to understand the codebase better.

BTW, I love the app, thanks for writing it!

[d99kris]

Thanks for highlighting, the contribution guidelines are a little outdated, let me try fix that up soon.

I've finally prepared some changes locally regarding the LID handling, but I'll need to test / use it for one week to minimize regressions, so I plan to push the fix next weekend. I'll update here again once it's in.

[d99kris]

FYI, the mentioned LID handling fixes has been committed in cfe36b6, so now I anticipate that userIds/chatIds to be stable going forward, and this should make it possible to implement mentions for WhatsApp groups. I've also been looking into this a little bit, and I'm thinking it's probably easiest to do "text mentions" first, like @Name / @[Name with space], later to extend with group member picker dialog.

[d99kris]

I missed to update this discussion thread before, but support for mentioning other users has been added in e6e6ec6 / v5.14.1.