Communication window

[Sadie]

   Would it be possible to light up the tab "in use"?  I keep typing in the wrong window... and have noticed others do, too.  I know I can click on the tab each time I want to "talk", but that destroys immersion in the game....  And a smaller window would be wonderful!

[Xillix Queen of Fools]

Sounds like a job for Feature Request, and the bug tracker!

[Akkaido Kivikar]

I believe there's a skin already in the mods section which puts a leaf on the open tab.

It was made for 0.5.0 so I am not sure if it still works.
http://www.hydlaaplaza.com/smf/index.php?topic=36336.0

[Bonifarzia]

   Would it be possible to light up the tab "in use"? 
....  And a smaller window would be wonderful!

Those two points have also been of importance for the Boni Skins. I shall provide an update soon with some dds for the mounts and the one line fix needed for the guild window. The chat.xml should still be fine, though.

[Akkaido Kivikar]

Also note you can change transparency of the window so doesn't get in your view so much.

Edit: Using Xoel's skin works. Channels with new messages have a leaf on them, with red title, the current channel selected has a leaf on it with normal colored title.

[bilbous]

What would really be awesome is to have a collapsible channel list where the currently selected channel was at the top, the channel with the most recent new contribution showed up right under it and so on down the list with channels that have no unviewed traffic not appearing at all unless you either used the appropriate /command to speak in them or you pulled them from a dropdown selector list.

Should be completely possible with xml but support might have to be added to the client.

I'm thinking that the current channel label could double as the selector dropdown. click on this label and all subscribed channels appear to select from.

[weltall]

it's not possible with the xml as we can't know where the tab are in order to "collapse" them. except if all the possible dispositions are set in the xml

[bilbous]

Well certainly the user created channels could be a real barrier but the default channels could occur in a standard order as they do already. Clearly I did not give the idea a lot of thought.
If only I hadn't given away my xml book I might have a better clue.

I suppose the user created channels could be added to the bottom of the list in the order they are subscribed but as I said previously support code to handle the extra xml would likely need to be added to the client to make it possible.

Pie in the sky thinking as usual.

[-stf-]

I think it's related to one bug more than a feature request. One example for all cases:
Player is writing message in the chat tab and someone starts to trade with him, or an other window appears or changes it's focus over the chat window and player doesn't recognize that until he types some more letters. Unfortunately, that causes he starts to use shortcuts and he either accidentally accepts or declines the trade, opens assigned windows, starts to run, casting or whatever is assigned to the used keys. I think everybody knows what I am talking about. The behavior should be that the new window appear or the windows change their contents but the originally selected and used window should stay selected and used.
If it is just about tabs in the chat window, then it's caused by selected option "Default last chat" in Options - Interface - Chat. That way you will always use the tab selected instead of last used, unless you will specify the other tab with command, i.e. /say or /tell.
About the interface - it's possible to make the chat window have the tabs on the top (as it was in 0.4) instead of on the left side, which is IMHO much better, because then you don't need to have too big chat window to see all tabs. If anybody interested, I can post modified xml file for chat window.