2.7 The roster buffer

The roster buffer is called *-jabber-roster-*. It simply contains a list of the contacts on your roster. If you have several accounts connected, contacts will be grouped by account.

In the roster buffer, any command which requires a JID will default to the JID under point when called. These commands can be called through either keyboard menus or mouse menus. To open a menu with the mouse, simply press the second mouse button over the JID in question.¹ This will bring up a menu with all available actions. The keyboard menus are split into categories: Chat, Roster, Information, MUC (Multi-User Chat, or groupchat) and Services, opened by C-c C-c, C-c C-r, C-c C-i, C-c C-m and C-c C-s, respectively.

A list of keybindings is displayed at the top of the roster buffer. You can turn it off by setting jabber-roster-show-bindings to nil.

You can call jabber-display-roster (bound to g) to redisplay your roster according to changed preferences (see Customizing the roster buffer). This will not refetch your roster from the server. Refetching the roster is usually not needed, since updates are pushed to clients automatically.

You can choose not to have the roster updated automatically on presence changes (see Presence alerts). In that case, you need to call jabber-display-roster manually.

Please note, that by default offline contacts showed in roster as any others. To hide them, you can use o in roster buffer. To permanently hide them, customize jabber-show-offline-contacts variable.