Gajim 1.9.0

Half a year after the last release, Gajim 1.9.0 is finally here. 🎉 This release brings long awaited support for message replies and message reactions. Message Moderation has been improved as well. Say hello to voice messages! Thank you for all your contributions!

What’s New

It took us quite some time, but now it’s here: Gajim 1.9 comes with a complete database overhaul, which enables new features such as Message Replies and Message Reactions.

Message Replies (XEP-0461: Message Replies) offer rich context, which wasn’t available previously when using message quotes. With Message Replies, Gajim shows you the author’s profile picture, nickname, and also the time the message was sent. Clicking a referenced message will jump to the original message.

Message Reactions (XEP-0444: Message Reactions) allow you to react to messages by using an emoji of your choice. When hovering messages, a floating action menu appears. This action menu offers three quick reactions and even more when clicking on the plus button. Hovering a reaction shows a tooltip containing infos about who sent which reaction - especially useful in group chats.

Message Moderation (XEP-0425: Moderated Message Retraction) has been updated to the latest version while staying compatible with older implementations, thus improving Gajim’s tools against spam.

The new database backend is based on SQLAlchemy and allows us to easily adapt to new requirements of upcoming standards, for example message retraction and rich file transfers.

Thanks to our contributor @mesonium, who brought audio previews to Gajim a year ago, Gajim is now able to record voice messages.

What else changed:

• Gajim’s message input now offers proper undo/redo functionalities
• Messages containing only an emoji are now displayed larger
• Message merging has been improved
• Notifications now show icons (e.g. a user’s profile picture) in more desktop environments
• Your connection state is now shown directly above the message input
• Group chat messages are displayed as ‘pending’ until they have been acknowledged by the server
• Group chat avatars can now be removed
• The main menu can now be toggled via Ctrl+M
• ‘Start Chat’ now shows contact list groups, status messages, and more
• Issues with using the Ctrl+C shortcut for copying message content have been fixed

This release also comes with many bugfixes. Have a look at the changelog for a complete list.

As always, don’t hesitate to contact us at gajim@conference.gajim.org or open an issue on our Gitlab.