Reinstate People and Room sections from the old room list instead of filters

[kepstin]

This issue intentionally duplicates (part of) Reinstate sections from the old room list instead of filters #30849 as requested in #32439 (comment) and #30849 (comment)

Steps to reproduce

1. Use Element or Element Web with a reasonable or large number of rooms and direct messages open

Outcome

What did you expect?

The "Home" section used to be organized such that direct message rooms ("People") and other rooms ("Rooms") were split into separate sections.

What happened instead?

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)
• Easily distinguish between people and rooms with similar names
• Keep track of different types of conversations
• Navigate efficiently without constantly switching between filters
• Manage my workspace as the number of rooms grows

Workaround

Edit: As of 2027-07-21, this workaround is no longer available due to #34040 completely removing the old user list.

It is still possible to revert to the old sidebar design that had separate "People" and "Rooms" sections:

• Use the /devtools command in a chat, and in the popup enable "Developer mode"
• Go to All settings, Labs, and scroll all the way to the bottom
• Turn off "Enable new room list"

Operating system

No response

Browser information

No response

URL for webapp

No response

Application version

No response

Homeserver

No response

Will you send logs?

No

[troyBORG]

Yeah this new layout this i horrible.
I had to ask AI to figured out how to turn the new thing off and restore it back.

If its under heavy development. (as it said in the UI). Don't force it on us!

I wanna chat with people but stress out trying to figure out how to find them with some stupid new UI!

[OlegGirko]

Removing the old room list completely before implementing its very basic functionality in the new one (like "People" section for one-to-one chats) was very rude.

[jahlives]

Related but distinct problem worth flagging here since the /devtools workaround is now gone (per the edit above, dead since #34040 in v1.12.24):

Even setting aside the People/Rooms sections question, there's a related gap in the collapsible room list: dragging the separator works fine down to the enforced minimum width, but below that minimum there's nothing — it jumps straight from minimum width to fully hidden. There's no icon-only intermediate state anymore.

The old (legacy) room list supported exactly that: collapse down to just the room/DM avatars, no names, no previews — useful when you want to reclaim horizontal space (e.g. for wide timelines, threads, or side-by-side windows) without losing the ability to see and click into your most recent/favourite rooms at a glance.

#29778 explicitly called removing the minimised (68px) width a "temporary measure until the new responsive designs are ready". The collapsible panels work from #32742 / #32909 / #32910 is clearly progress in that direction, but it currently only gives you "full-to-minimum" ↔ "hidden" — there's still no step between the minimum width and fully collapsed.

Could the responsive redesign include restoring a proper icon-only collapsed state (like the old room list had) below the current minimum width, rather than jumping straight to fully hidden? For anyone with a lot of rooms/spaces open side-by-side with other windows, this is a real usability regression, not just a cosmetic one.

[Cerothen]

Could the responsive redesign include restoring a proper icon-only collapsed state (like the old room list had) below the current minimum width, rather than jumping straight to fully hidden? For anyone with a lot of rooms/spaces open side-by-side with other windows, this is a real usability regression, not just a cosmetic one.

As mentioned here above my common Element use is to use 1/3 rd of my FDH (1080p) screen as is the standard snap proportion on windows. However at 1/3rd the screen width with the room list being so wide the messaging panel is nearly unusable due to the very narrow width left for the actual message content.