12 Typing notifications

There are two protocols for “contact is typing” notifications in Jabber. jabber.el supports both of them, displaying various information in the header line of chat buffers.

12.1 Message events

The older protocol is called Message Events (see XEP-0022). Besides typing notification, it lets you know what happens to the messages you send. These states are possible:

• ‘In offline storage’ (the user will receive it on next logon)
• ‘Delivered’ to user's client (but not necessarily displayed)
• ‘Displayed’ to user
• User is ‘typing a message’

The first state is only reported by servers; the other three are reported by clients. jabber.el can report all three of them, and can display all four; not all clients support all states, though.

If you don't want jabber.el to send out this information about you, set the variables jabber-events-confirm-delivered, jabber-events-confirm-displayed, and/or jabber-events-confirm-composing to nil. You can make jabber.el not to request such information by customizing jabber-events-request-these.

12.2 Chat states

The newer protocol is called Chat States (see XEP-0085). Rather than dealing with individual messages, it describes the state of the chat session between two people. The following states are possible:

• Active (the default state, not displayed)
• Inactive
• Composing
• Paused (i.e., taking a short pause in composing)
• Gone

jabber.el can display all five states, but only ever sends “active” and “composing” itself.

To customize sending of chat states, customize the variable jabber-chatstates-confirm.