Inline composer comes to Geary

And you think you get difficult email.
And you think you get difficult email.

A year in the making, I’m pleased to announce that we’ve landed a major new feature in Geary: an inline email composer.  What’s that mean?  In short, when you go to reply to a conversation, instead of a new window popping up on the screen, the composer is embedded in the window right below the message you’re replying to.  Want a separate window?  Just press the Detach button and you’re writing emails just like Geary used to work.  Old School, as the kids say.

This great addition to Geary is thanks to the hard and tireless work of Robert Schroll who put this together on a private branch and has been maintaining it for some time now.  Serendipity led Robert to San Francisco last week, and he generously spent a good chunk of his time here working with me to finalize snapping the pieces of the puzzle together and polishing the chrome.  It’s pretty sweet, I must say.

The inline composer is only available in git master at the moment.  It’ll be available for general release in our next stable version, Geary 0.8.  In the meantime, if you’re so bold and want to give it a test drive, you can build Geary from master.  Or, if you’re running Ubuntu, install it from Yorba’s Daily Build PPA (but be sure to read the warnings on that page!)  The more eyeballs the better.  If you find a bug, please let us know.

14 thoughts on “Inline composer comes to Geary”

  1. That’s great news Jim! Looking really forward to this, It’s going to improve my user experience a lot. Only one concern: What happens to the mail you are writing if you change your inbox or similar?

    1. Right now Geary prompts you with a dialog box if you want to close the composer. We want to add a feature that, if auto-save drafts is available, Geary simply saves the draft for you. When you return to the conversation, the inline composer is there with your draft waiting.

  2. I would like to try it but I don’t use Ubuntu & I don’t want to have to build from git. Any chance you would consider start using copr for Fedora users?

    1. We have enough on our plates developing the software and maintaining two PPAs. It would be better if someone in the community stepped up and started a COPR.

  3. Looking at the screenshot makes me shiver — surely you’re not encouraging top-posting?!

  4. I tried it out recently I really like it! Great work!

    Are there any plans to implement viewing emails in plainttext and monospace font?

    1. Drag-and-drop for attachments is supported. The only limitation is that you can’t drag them into the edit box itself, you must drag them elsewhere in the compose window. Is it not working for you?

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