Channels & direct messages
Chat that sets itself up around your projects, teams and divisions.
Chat is a companion to your work, not a separate place to keep track of. It comes in three shapes — channels, group chats and direct messages — and most of the channels are already there before you make any.
Channels that create themselves
Noots creates a channel for every Noot, team and division you belong to. They appear when you load Chat, so existing projects get one too, not just new ones.
- Names come from the source — "Q3 Pricing Rewrite" becomes
q3-pricing-rewrite. - Membership mirrors the source: you only get a channel for work you're actually on.
- An org-visible Noot's channel is public. Team, division and private-project channels are private, so a private project's existence is never leaked through the channel list.
- A Noot's channel is pinned to its Noot, which is why
/summarizealready knows where to file things.
A very large workspace fills its channel list in over a few visits rather than all at once — up to 25 new channels are created per load.
Channels you make
- Types
- Public (anyone can join) or private (invite-only).
- How to create
- Chat → New channel → name it and choose public or private.
- How to change
- Channel settings → rename, set the topic, add or remove members, or archive.
- Private channels
- On the Team plan and above.
The sidebar
One rail, one scroll. Your people come first under a DMs heading with a rule under it — direct messages and group chats together, because a group chat is people. Then Projects. Then the rooms, grouped under their category names, which are headings rather than rows. There is no second rail, no Chats-versus-Channels subtab, and no permanent word "Channels" above the list.
- A long list of people folds. The rail shows eight direct conversations and puts the rest behind Show all N, with the unread it is holding back printed beside it. Unread is a priority *within* those eight, never an exemption from them — a rail showing thirty unread people is the thing the fold exists to prevent.
- A category is a heading, a channel is a row. They are the same size; the heading is told apart by weight, tone and sitting at the list's own gutter, while channels indent inside it. Channels in no category sit above the categories, because anything after the last category reads as belonging to it.
- New channel is a control at the end of the rooms, always visible. It replaced the old section heading's "+" — a control cannot be mistaken for a label, which a heading at the same size as its contents can.
- Projects holds the auto-created channel for each Noot you are actually on — not every project channel you could join. In a workspace where most projects are org-visible, everybody is auto-joined to every public channel, so without that test your "projects" would be the entire company's. It starts collapsed, and remembers whether you opened it.
- A project's channel carries its Noot's own glyph and accent — the one place a channel gets a mark, because there the mark is information. Ordinary channels carry none; a group chat carries its members' faces.
- Nothing reorders itself while you're reading. The order is your explicit drag order, then name.
Changing the order
| Order | What it does |
|---|---|
| Your order | Your explicit drag order, then name. This is the default, and nothing moves on its own. |
| Recent | Most recently active first. Conversations move when a new message arrives. |
| Unread | Anything unread rises to the top, then your order. |
Whatever the rail is hiding — the people behind Show all N, a collapsed Projects section — the unread counts are computed from the unfiltered list. Folding can hide a conversation; it can never hide the fact that it has something in it.