It seems to me that Fedra doesn't provide the same level of sound notifications that FastSMRW does. I'm talking about sounds when, say, someone sends a message or mentions you. So if you're in Fedra and any of that happens, you don't get audio notification.
@amir You do, check the timelines menu, and make sure to have it enabled in the settings.
@jonathan859 Well, the only thing in the Timeline menu is Use the Default Notification Sound. I've selected that. Notifications are also enabled in Settings. But I hear nothing when, say, I send a message in Fedra or when I hit a message, via Up/ Down, mentioning me.
@amir Uh, yeah. But that's not a notification, that's just UI soundpack fancy stuff. Why would you need a sound when you've send a message? I guess you know you did that.
@amir But yeah, never the less, that's personal preference. And indeed not available in Fedra, I think it was rather not a priority. You could open an issue about it. But I think the goal is to keep it rather clean. Just my thoughts.
@jonathan859 And when I open Fedra, I'm not told, via any sound, that I have mentions, favorites or stuff like that. I have to check all of those manually. But I really love Fedra's nimble Mention Suggestion facility. @TheQuinbox
@jonathan859 @amir Sound does help. In some instances, speech does too. I guess it's about customizability. Blind people are very much dependent on various sound schemes for events and notifications. Earcons are the theme for us.
@jonathan859 Nope. It was an example. If others send messages I don't hear that either. When others take some actions I'm not notified. And the biggest one is not knowing you've been mentioned when using Up/ Down to navigate quickly. @TheQuinbox
@amir @TheQuinbox Yeah, I mean I get what you mean. I personally don't need it, but I wouldn't say no to it either. I liked having it in the old clients. But Fedra does tons of things so much better, I can miss out on that for the advantages. But I understand.
@jonathan859 @TheQuinbox Exactly. Fedra doesn't seem to repeat messages or read some unrelated/ old message as I open it. If it had sounds for in-app notifications, it could become my default Mastodon app on Windows.
Oct 7, 2026, 3:24 PM@amir My only real wish for Fedra is separate sounds for mentions and notifications--I know there is a mentions buffer, but the notifications buffer also contains them. otherwise, you have to supply your own sounds but you can change them per-buffer. I haven't tested whether adding a sent buffer sound will cause your own sent posts to play a sound, but I should.
Fedra is also the only client I've used recently; I have something that works and am a little change-resistent.
@simon I think full soundpack support, including all actions, would complement Fedra. I say full action to cover cases like a message containing audio. With FastSMRW, if a message contains media and I reach it, I'm notified via a specific sound. Fedra can also provide such a capability.
Oct 7, 2026, 3:44 PM@amir Yeah, that's one of those conventions that comes from the days of Qwitter, and a lot of clients have designed themselves around it. Fedra started out realy minimal, not even having sound customization, and in some ways I like that. The invisible interface clients were getting way too bloated and convoluted. Fedra just got an invisible interface and I haven't looked at it yet--honestly, I don't see the point. I can summon up the window with a single keystroke and then use single keystrokes to move between timelines and read them. Why would I want to hold down three modifier keys and then retrain myself every time Windows steals another set of hotkeys? But little things like the audio/poll/image sounds would be nice for sure. Why don't you suggest it on the Github? A compromise (or an addition) could be adding a keyword to the beginning of the post text to indicate it has media in it, as this is something a sighted person would notice immediately but we currently have to wait until the end of the post to know it has media at all.
@pitermach @simon It would be better to have it built in without having to make those manual edits.
Oct 7, 2026, 3:51 PM@amir @pitermach Yeah, and while it's cool that we have different templates for each timeline, having to edit them all individually is a little tedious. I wish we had, say, building blocks for templates we could reference in variables inside other templates. So my template for posts in every timeline could just be $username: $default_template, or something.
@simon @amir I guess the question then is how would you implement that without making the UI a mess. FastSMRW ditched templates in favor of having a list where you can reorder items up and down which could be an option here too, though Fedras template system lets you make conditional statements and that would be pretty hard to do in a GUI.
Oct 7, 2026, 3:59 PM@pitermach @amir It's hard to do, but I could argue that having to manually edit code is harder.
I like what Foobar does in its UI editing mnode, which I bet almost nobody else has ever used. You get a list of preset template items you can add and reorder, but then you also have the ability to add custom fields, which can be conditional--they can even show nothing at all. In my playlist view in Foobar, I have a template that checks if the track is playing, and then further checks whether it's paused. So in front of the currently targeted playlist item, I either see "Playing, " "Paused, " or nothing at all. The comma is part of the conditional text. That was a little annoying to make, but I figured it out, and people who don't want to mess with all tha don't have to figure it out--they can just shuffle the existing items around.
That still doesn't solve the problem of editing specific templates to all be the same though; maybe each template box needs a way to specify "Just use the home timeline template for this type of post." That would solve a lot of duplication.
@simon How do you even access this? That would be super useful, especially if I could switch between different templates depending on my use case! Your'e talking about editing the content of the playlist? What about the status bar, title, and system tray icon? @pitermach @amir
Oct 7, 2026, 7:14 PM@x0 All of that is possible in preferences under "Default User Interface". That's also where you can add custom templates that can be used later in the playlist view.
When you've added those, go to the view menu and go into layout editing mode. Now, your context menu will have different things in it depending on--well--context. You can change every element of the main window and manually add separators. Some of that is not accessible unless I'm missing something.
For instance, if you go to the context menu from the playlist view, you can check and uncheck columns, but I can't find a way to reorder them and drag/drop seems inconsistent. So the best way I've found is to clear all the columns that are there, and then manually check them one by one in the order you want them. These will include the custom columns you've added before.
I have a few of my own defined which I'll put here for reference, but another approach is to just define exactly what you want displayed in one long, messy template, and then add that as a column. In screen reader land the actual order really doesn't matter.
Play Status: $if(%isplaying%,$if(%ispaused%,Paused',',Playing','))
conditional duration: $if(%length%,%length%)
album/track: [%album% ][%discnumber%.][%tracknumber%]
@pitermach @amir
Oct 7, 2026, 7:16 PM@x0 One fun iscovery that came from that adventure is the ability to add a tab bar to the interface, add tabs to that tab bar, and have completely different user interfaces in each of those tabs. I don't remember exactly how I did it, but I have one with the playlist view and playlist manager, another with the playlist view and bookmarks, and another with the playlist view and the media library (which it turns out I basically never use). @pitermach @amir
@pitermach @simon I like FastSMRW's Audio and Earcons tabs in the Settings window, and don't find them complicated at all.
@simon Well said, and sure thing. I'll open an issue on Github.
@simon Issue created! @TheQuinbox
https://github.com/trypsynth/fedra/issues/155