And buggy. Element/Matrix is the worst chat app I have to use on a semi-regular basis.

I have to click away three modal popups during every single login, and it doesn't remember logins so I have to login every time I visit the page. It also asks me to verify my login/device on every login because it doesn't remember. This happens on two devices, with two different browsers.

Is that on a self hosted, or on app.element.io? I have a self hosted, and I just opened it and it logged me straight in - I can't remember the last time I logged in as I use the desktop client.

I just tried app.element.io and it asks if I want to "store data in persistent storage" - maybe you clicked no a while back, and it is still blocked?

Sounds like you log in from a web browser, but clear local storage (or cookies) at the end of your browsing session?

I log in rarely enough that this doesn't accommodate me: my most recent browser login must have been two years ago or so.

Any other website with login manages to remember my login. Not sure what causes it, but it's not fun.

What are the modals you have to dismiss? That doesn't sound familiar to me at all. Could have something to do with it?

Ok, it's actually 4 popups, 2 of which are modal:

- "Verify login" (now always skipping this one because I need to do it every single time I login, and I need to login every time I visit the page)

- "Are you sure?" (Yes, I really don't like this one because I'm only skipping because verifying doesn't help)

- "Verify session" (okay, not modal, still occludes parts of the page. Also skipping, because it's useless since I have to repeat it every time)

- "Help us improve element by sending user data" (No, I don't want to send user data)

Needless to say, I don't enjoy starting up Element.

Hmm, interesting, those don't really sound to me like the cause. Is there anything in the site settings or anything, maybe it's disallowed from local storage?

For what little it's worth, I haven't run into the need to login on every visit on either FF or Chrome. Which is just to confirm that it's not supposed to work that way.

Somehow you're clearing all the data Element uses. Those popups only show up on initial login to a new browser session.

If you're clearing cookies or local data that would be why.

I'm not doing anything. Same thing happens on Firefox on one PC, and chrome on another. But only for Element, all other web pages have no issue with persistent logins.

> How do people connect to matrix?

Unfortunately, I don't, yet. Still waiting on a decent TUI. I had my hopes up for weechat-matrix-rs[1] but it hasn't seen a commit in two months so I guess it's dead. And so I remain on IRC.

[1] https://github.com/poljar/weechat-matrix-rs

The author appears to be working on the matrix-rust-sdk which is a dependency of that plugin pretty consistently for the last month: https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-rust-sdk/commits/master

Fluffychat [1] is probably the best alternative client, written in Flutter. But it is also missing a lot of features and is not exactly polished.

[1] https://fluffychat.im/

On linux fluffy chat uses a lot more CPU than Element. That's not a compliment for Element, but rather a depiction of the poor state of Flutter apps.

I tried pretty much all third party Matrix apps, if you want cross device signing, there's only Element, an element fork and some of these half working flutter clients.

It's not great. The initial developer for the weechat client did a great job, but the move to rust has pretty much stalled from what I can tell.

Nheko is not perfect and lacks polish in some places, but I like it a lot, and it supports cross-signing.

Appreciate the comment, last time I tried it all of this was missing. Seems like it's a fully fledged alternative now.

I'll try it out. Seems like they implemented most code in a mtxclient library, so it might be possible to reuse it for other clients.

mtxclient mostly implements the API calls and some crypto primitives. A lot of stuff still lives in Nheko, because we couldn't figure out how to fit it neatly into mtxclient (like the storage layer, device verification flows, etc). But apart from that, probably. It is pure C++, so you don't even need to use Qt to create a client with it. (In general it may be better to contribute to an existing client though. There are a lot and they could use some help to become more polished.)

I've been reading the Nheko updates in This Week in Matrix with enthusiasm. How are E2EE and cross-signing coming along? Once those parts are fully implemented, stable, and trustworthy, it will look pretty attractive as a replacement for Element desktop.

They are implemented, but I would say there are still bugs in it and it isn't yet 100% trustworthy. Moving E2EE out of beta is one of the goals for the next release though. There are still some minor kinks, but I have been using Nheko as my primary client for E2EE chats for 2 years now. I wouldn't trust it if you know someone is actively trying to get at your data, but for normal day to day chats the current master branch should be good enough.

Things that are currently still missing: - online key backup: The asymmetric version allows server operators to insert keys and the symmetric one isn't yet supported by any client. I don't use key backup on my account, since I have enough devices that I don't need it and it makes bugs in E2EE harder to find. - cross-signing bootstrap: You need Element to enable cross-signing on your account once atm. - A toggle to only send keys to verified devices in a room and warnings if unverified devices are in a room: currently working on this - Fixing one stupid edge case, where we create new identity keys by mistake, if Nheko fails to open the database and this breaks E2EE for that login. Hard to hit by accident, but it happens quite a lot if you change database code and mess something up. :D

I think apart from that we are in somewhat good shape. I still have a few small things on my to do list and we obviously need to go through the code a few more times to look for mistakes and test it a lot more, but for 0.9.0 that should be doable. After 0.9.0 we'll probably look into fallback keys as well as dehydrated devices.

I can vouch for Nheko. It’s fast as well (native code with Qt?).

Yes, most of it is Qt quick, some parts are still Qt widgets AFAIK.

Subjectively speaking, it's one of the fastest and most fully-featured clients: it even supports desktop sharing with pipewire and gstreamer.

It's a lot easier to use once you get used to the Ctrl+K shortcut to select a room.

Good: FluffyChat's CPU usage has been reduced so it no longer burns CPU (nor makes Xorg burn CPU) when idle, only when typing or moving your mouse (with call stacks deep in Flutter event handling).

Bad: It's written in Flutter, and the keyboard/mouse handling still has flaws.

Ugly: The FluffyChat Matrix library used by FluffyChat (https://pub.dev/packages/matrix) requires contributors to sign a CLA where you sign away copyrights/trademarks, and perhaps even become obligated to assist the Famedly company in IP lawsuits.

The Rust rewrite is stalled but not abandoned, there's just been a bit of a slump due to time constraints. Which features are you missing the most?

Schildichat works between devices, I get notifications on both riot.im element and schildichat on Android, as well as on my desktop.

Maybe I am unclear of what cross device signing is

weechat-matrix works well; you should just install the libolm3 dependency.

It absolutely does not work well. It only just barely works if all you need is chatting in public rooms that you joined from another client (e.g. Element). Everything else (joining rooms, sending private messages to people you don't have a 1:1 room with, viewing images sent to encrypted rooms, …) is painful or impossible.

And then there's the "little" issue of it not being able to coexist with wee-slack. That's a bug Python 3.9, not in weechat-matrix, but still.

I mean, I still use it because all I really need is chatting in already joined public rooms and for that it's better than that Element/Electron crap, because it's still a weechat after all, but it absolutely is not ready for any kind of serious usage. It's just a quick hack that sort of maybe works, sometimes.

I tried it before but the other problem is that the plugin seem to _only_ accept `virtualenv` method of python virtual env handling which I'm not familiar with. https://github.com/poljar/weechat-matrix#using-virtualenv

I personally don't use a virtualenv for weechat-matrix; seems like a bit of a hassle.

Either way, `virtualenv` is a drop-in replacement for `python -m venv` (or rather it was the other way around - virtualenv came first, but virtualenv still exists for different tradeoffs).

It needs quite a few dependencies in its `requirements.txt`. Did you install them globally? If I use `-m venv`, it doesn't produce the `activate_this.py` file that this plugin needs.

You could use matterbridge[1] to connect & bridge the various new networks including matrix back to a client of your choice - in my case the same znc+irssi I've been using for a long time[2]

[1] https://github.com/42wim/matterbridge/

[2] https://xkcd.com/1782/

I'm using Fractal several months, working fine.

Fractal is nice and looks great on GNOME, but no e2ee and uses more CPU than Element.

> uses more CPU than Element

0.25% CPU right now, ~10 channels, some of them are 1k+ on Libera.

Hope e2ee arrives soon in Next branch.