Draft: multiple accounts

[alangecker]

first draft of multiple element instances in the same electron BrowserWindow.

Works so far, but there is still a lot to do (see ToDo list) and I can't promise that I'll find time for that in the next weeks 🙃

related element-hq/element-web#2320

ToDo's

• proper react menu with (webpack?) building
• show badge counts in menu
• aggregate badge counts for tray
• open correct instance on notification click
• make multiple profiles optional (via lab flag?)
• apply a change in theme to all instances + menu
• menu i18n
• menu styling
• instance chooser for protocol links
• bring back electrons dropdown menu
• accessibility
• how to handle 'page-favicon-updated' and 'page-title-updated' now? (tray.ts)
• tests
• proper session partition naming, renaming possible?
• migration of existing sessions

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[yuuyins]

nice! i think the UI should be iterated. instead of using yet another column for that which convolutes the UI, try using the already existing user button in the top left for switching accounts.

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[gmanskibiditoilet]

hi @florianduros can you please assign some reviewers to review this code? its a very nice, must-hav feature

[florianduros]

@gmanskibiditoilet the PR is in draft, in work in progress and seems to be abandoned by the author. The PR is far to be in a state to be reviewed or merged.

[dreirund]

Before going into the tedious work of building this locally: Does this actually still work with up to date element-git?

If so, I would build locally and apply this patch.

Regards!

[alangecker]

that was more of a proof of concept than a revieable/mergeable PR (@gmanskibiditoilet) and it certainly won't build anymore after 2,5 years (@dreirund).

@yuuyins and I myself have some concerns adding yet another column, but doing it differently would require quite some work on the actual element-web / matrix-react-sdk code instead of just being an wrapper around that.

Even keeping the concept like drafted in this PR it would still require a lot of work (see ToDo-List above) to reach an actual good state which could be merged. I won't have the capacity for it for the time being. But if anyone wants to take on the project, I can be available for questions/support!

[florianduros]

Since the PR creation, we move to the new rust sdk to handle the cryptography side of EW. Sadly, currently our web rust crypto stack doesn't support multi account. So even if the EW ui supports multi account, under the hood it will not work

[dreirund]

Since this wraps anyway -- I have seen that manually different element-desktop instances can be run which use different data directories by setting environment variables/ command line options (have to read into that again), which handled at the level of electron which is used to run element. So can't we, just as a quick-and-dirty thing, wrap different element/ electron instances in a tabbed window, each of them using a different data directory? We still do not have unified contacts view then as email clients can be configured to not care about accounts but just show folders, _but_ at least getting the "notification dots" of total notifications per instance forwarded to the tabs should be achievable. (I am not a programmer, so I cannot help; but what I can do is package this for Arch Linux.)