Hello @zulip/server-compose members, this pull request was labeled with the "area: compose" label, so you may want to check it out!

Thanks for working on this!

I played with the PR, and it mostly worked, but I did come across a case where it did not. When I copied selected just the "topics" file link on http://localhost:9991/#narrow/stream/3-Denmark/topic/LAST.20database.20was.20de-duping.20erratically/near/29, the whole message got quoted.

Hmmm, struggling to repro this behavior - sorry to ask, but can you provide a screenshot?

Here's what I'm seeing:

In that example, quoting code worked:

as per design, quotes the complete current message when you try to quote-reply across multiple messages:

(note: the highlighting in the screenshots is artificial: I re-selected the text after initiating the quote-reply, for the purposes of showing what I selected... I looked into highlighting as a feature but it gets complicated because the selection can span "into" the middle of a DOM object, and we'd need to carefully insert <span class="highlight" in just the right places... definitely doable, but I figured let's get this feature shipped first and see how people like it, before making the additional investment...)

thx!

Oh, my bad, I didn't realize the link in my comment above is not stable!

Here's a gif:

@alya fixed - try it now. I also added support for capturing the selection if the user right-clicks / pulls up the context menu on Chrome/Safari/Brave. Firefox doesn't highlight the last element on right-click. keep 'em coming...
.oO( who knew there were so many corner cases? oh right, we're dealing with web browsers LOL )

Hmm, things are really going haywire when I try it:

I also saw some differences in behavior between quote-and-reply with the mouse and quote-and-reply with >, so that's something to keep an eye on as well.

@alya ugh sorry - not sure what happened, but I simplified the code and re-tested the cases:

• selection: text, link, random text on the screen (eg. + invite users)
• quote_and_reply trigger: shortcut, message menu
• browser: chrome, firefox, safari

note: on menu-click, Safari loses focus (blur) and updates the selection to the empty string. I can ignore empty string, but then other blur events (e.g. clicking +invite user) will retain the old selection, which becomes weird when you then reply to a message. We could have Safari only support partial-quoting when using the keyboard (>) but not the menu?