I wouldn’t consider Telegram a well-done cross-platform app. It’s a mobile app, badly ported to desktop, and I find telegram-desktop quite annoying under Linux. Here are most of the ways where there are actual problems, quite apart from it just using foreign UI design paradigms that make it not fit in:
Its keyboard accessibility is very poor: about all you can do is switching between conversations, scrolling inside a conversation, posting messages, and editing recent messages. You can’t interact with any buttons, menus or popups that they open.
Its text editing fields (plain and rich text) get caret navigation wrong for the platform, e.g. Ctrl+Right moves to the start of the next word, rather than the end of the current word; and punctuation is treated as a separate “word” rather than being grouped with a preceding (in the direction of navigation) word.
Its rich text editing component (for sending messages) doesn’t let you format text while typing: “hello, <Ctrl+I>world” should make the second word italic, but that Ctrl+I doesn’t actually do anything: you have to type “hello, world”, then go back and select “world” and press Ctrl+I. (This is by far the most frustrating of the issues, resulting in me mostly just not formatting messages.)
When I type emoji in (via a Compose key in my case, but it’s hardly the only way of typing emoji natively), they appear as rectangles, and stay that way until you post the message or type a character before the emoji, at which point it swaps it for a graphical emoji.
If you don't consider telegram a well-done cross platform app, then what are your standards? There is literally no other app that is as X-platform as telegram. Nothing by MS, Facebook, Google, Apple or any other company in the world comes close to releasing an app for Every mobile and desktop platform. On top of that, Telegram is better in performance and offer far more features than competitors who release in fewer platforms... FOR FREE. There are so many more things to praise before thinking of any criticism about emojis not looking right before sending in Linux desktop lol.
I don’t know if there are any in this sort of space that I would consider well-done. But I do know that a single-codebase mobile app port to desktop is unlikely to ever qualify, even if in some other regards it’s excellent.
The unified-UI battle is long lost. Nowadays, I much prefer a sane style instead of whatever RAD design GNOME/Windows11/etc people have come up with....
> Emoji
IIRC, the compose key uses a limited set of old emojis. I've been using dmenu-wrappers for inserting emojis, like this one:
https://github.com/Mange/rofi-emoji
The points you mentioned are minor issues (I know, it adds up) but compare that to the alternatives: Discord, Slack, Element, Whatsapp...Mere starting up those apps and sending a `hi` to someone easily could take ~30 secs
Many times, the sluggish experience in Discord caused me to just ignore joining in my favorite servers and discussions.
On the UI side, telegram-desktop does things in a radically different way from typical desktop software, that’s my objection, structuring things in a way that only makes sense on small-screen devices.
The Compose key can be customised via ~/.XCompose. I’m talking about things like U+1F928 FACE WITH ONE EYEBROW RAISED. Anything that has a graphical representation gets mangled.
On the alternatives: I haven’t ever tried much in this space, so I don’t know if there are any that I would consider well-done. Performance is probably the biggest objection to many of them.
not disagreeing with any of your problems, but i guess the point was that there are barely any other significant mobile messengers that also _have_ a desktop app, let alone one that is snappy.
Disclamiar: telegram user on windows, linux, ios and android
consumer and soho routers are usually bridging wifi and lan together whereas professional and enterprise tend to run seperate networks, mostly for security reasons.
Its keyboard accessibility is very poor: about all you can do is switching between conversations, scrolling inside a conversation, posting messages, and editing recent messages. You can’t interact with any buttons, menus or popups that they open.
Its text editing fields (plain and rich text) get caret navigation wrong for the platform, e.g. Ctrl+Right moves to the start of the next word, rather than the end of the current word; and punctuation is treated as a separate “word” rather than being grouped with a preceding (in the direction of navigation) word.
Its rich text editing component (for sending messages) doesn’t let you format text while typing: “hello, <Ctrl+I>world” should make the second word italic, but that Ctrl+I doesn’t actually do anything: you have to type “hello, world”, then go back and select “world” and press Ctrl+I. (This is by far the most frustrating of the issues, resulting in me mostly just not formatting messages.)
When I type emoji in (via a Compose key in my case, but it’s hardly the only way of typing emoji natively), they appear as rectangles, and stay that way until you post the message or type a character before the emoji, at which point it swaps it for a graphical emoji.