"Cherry-pick and batch reply" backlog/backscroll management UI for chat apps (Fractal, Polari, etc.) and email clients (Evolution, Geary)
Problem statement / user story
When you use chat applications with backscroll / backlogs, such as Fractal (Matrix) or Polari (if you use an IRC bouncer like Bip), and you are in many channels but only interacting with with some channels "every now and then", if you read the backscroll it is quite likely that there would be multiple items that may need your attention to quote-reply to.
However, the constant up-and-down scrolling required to do so makes it impossible to be efficient… so what you end up doing in practice is replying to things "as you read them" through the backlog and firing them off one at a time yolo-style, without having seen the full backlog, because realistically nobody wants to read a huge backscroll 2, 3, 4 times…
As a result, it is possible that your replies conflict with themselves, or that you would reply to something someone else already replied to.
Potential idea to think about
It occurred to me that it would be very nice if our chat applications assisted the user in going through the backscroll and "picking" messages to batch reply to once they're done going through the backlog. Kind of like Hey's "Reply later" and "Focus & Reply" feature.
As per the video demonstration linked above, the same idea could also be applied to our email clients in GNOME.
It would be nice if we could have designs for how this could look & behave like in chat and email applications (I could see Geary and Evolution benefiting from this, instead of users locking themselves to a proprietary non-standard webmail provider…).