This issue is tracking the development progress of the sections in the room list.
Problem
Users with many rooms and DMs struggle to manage their conversations in Element.
The "All Chats" list shows everything in a single, flat stream without any way
to organize or group conversations. This makes it hard to:
- Find important chats quickly (they get buried in the list)
- Keep track of different types of conversations (work vs personal, projects, teams, etc.)
- Navigate efficiently without constantly switching between filters
- Manage their workspace as their number of rooms grows
Solution
A way to organize their "All Chats" list that works for them — whether that's
grouping by project, team, topic, or priority. This structure should:
- Stay consistent (not change every time they refresh)
- Reduce the mental effort of scanning through dozens or hundreds of chats
- Keep important conversations visible and easy to access
- Scale well as users join more rooms and DMs
Right now, the flat list creates too much cognitive overhead for users with
medium to large room lists, and there's no good way to impose structure on it.
Figma design
Plan
The section feature must be implemented first under a labs flag. Shared components dev doesn't need to be behind a flag since if the view model doesn't return a section, the room list stays flat.
I recommend to do each numerated task in each phase in dedicated PRs to avoid big chunk of PRs
P1 is first mandatory phase.
P2, P3, P4 can be done in parallel but depend on P1.
P5, P6, P7, P8 can be done in parallel but depend on P4.
This issue is tracking the development progress of the sections in the room list.
Problem
Users with many rooms and DMs struggle to manage their conversations in Element.
The "All Chats" list shows everything in a single, flat stream without any way
to organize or group conversations. This makes it hard to:
Solution
A way to organize their "All Chats" list that works for them — whether that's
grouping by project, team, topic, or priority. This structure should:
Right now, the flat list creates too much cognitive overhead for users with
medium to large room lists, and there's no good way to impose structure on it.
Figma design
Plan
The section feature must be implemented first under a labs flag. Shared components dev doesn't need to be behind a flag since if the view model doesn't return a section, the room list stays flat.
I recommend to do each numerated task in each phase in dedicated PRs to avoid big chunk of PRs
P1 is first mandatory phase.
P2, P3, P4 can be done in parallel but depend on P1.
P5, P6, P7, P8 can be done in parallel but depend on P4.