The official Slack and Discord clients, as well as my IRC client, all have the following behavior:

The text entered in the message compose field is tracked per-channel. If I type some text and then click on a different channel, the field becomes empty; if I click back to the original channel, the text comes back. This is useful when simultaneously composing messages in different channels.

Ripcord, in contrast, usually shares entered text across all channels… although sometimes it doesn't (the behavior seems inconsistent and potentially buggy). It would be nice to change this.

Going further…

Slack and Discord (but not my IRC client) also save the entered text persistently.

• Discord appears to save it in browser local storage: closing the Discord browser tab and opening a new one preserves the text, but switching to a different browser does not.

• Slack appears to save it on the server, and has a convenient "Drafts" view where you can see a list of channels where you had text entered.

Ideally, Ripcord would have a version of Slack's Drafts view, synced with the server for Slack and using local storage for Discord.

I don't really want to use Slack's drafts thing… it's complicated and seems to sometimes go wrong. The text shouldn't be lost when navigating between channels, though. That would be a bug. Do you have a way to reproduce it?

I found a way to reliably cause it; start to reply to a message and then change the channel, and it'll blank out. What the proper behavior in that case should be I don't know, since the reply is channel-based.