Ability to save (export) parts of a discussion as a plaintext log file
Be it for archival purposes, accountability or for sharing with other people in projects I'm working on, I save logs of every important discussion. Plaintext is the only format I trust in that regard.
I would love for Fractal to handle this usecase better than xchat-gnome (or hexchat) did. If you use xchat-gnome/hexchat's menu item to save a log of the current discussion, it does not allow you to set a beginning and an end, does not go into the backlog.
Still, most of the time, if you ask xchat-gnome to save a log file, it ends up corrupting it. Go figure how it manages to do that... so anyway I end up just copy-pasting from the chat window to gedit, and saving manually.
The way I see it, Fractal can handle this two ways:
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Rely on the user manually copy-pasting text. Besides the fact that this isn't even possible in Fractal right now (you can't select more than one line), this has disadvantages in general:
- Selections are a bit tricky to operate with long scrolled text areas: you have to start a selection, scroll to the other end, then press & hold the Shift key, then click the endpoint of the selection. Very tricky to achieve without being offtarget.
- As other people in the chatroom continue to chat, your scrolling area/scrollbar will change.
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A tailored log save feature. We could imagine that calling this feature would allow you to place a "start point" and an "end point" markers before you can save to a plaintext logfile (with the current timestamp and channel name as the default filename). This needs to be able to go back even in the backlog from the previous connection or Fractal run, just like a normal ctrl+C.
The 2nd approach (a dedicated plaintext save/export feature) would be best in my view, because the copy-paste approach creates somewhat messy output, as the nicknames are not clearly identified and do not repeat. Instead, this is the kind of clean chatlog syntax I would like to see exported:
<bob> Oh hi
<bob> I'm in ur IRC channel
<alice> flooding ur logs