Auto-Scrolling not Working on Adium on macOS 10.15
With the upgrade to macOS 10.15 Catalina, I noticed that Adium is not functioning as it should. Specifically, that the chat windows are not auto-scrolling to the bottom on new input to the window. I'm guessing this is something related to the way the internals of Adium, and macOS are updating the contents of the window, but it's also well known that Adium hasn't had the best support in the last few years, so it might not get fixed.
Thankfully, the Forums are still alive, and this was posted recently:
Running version 1.5.10.4 Adium on MacOs Catalina version 10.15.
Previously, in Chats when the list of text boxes was scrolled to the bottom, any additional messages, either typed by user or received from other users, was added to the bottom and the list was scrolled up to reveal it. After upgrading to Catalina yesterday, this autoscrolling behavior has stopped working. When user types a message and hits return, the new message is hidden. Likewise, messages from other users are not revealed by scrolling up. So one has to constantly manually scroll up to see the message thread.
No respondants with ideas - yet, but I have hope that the few that have access to the code can at least make the code available - if not fix the bug, and then we can get back to our lives. But if not, I found InstantBird which seems to have been somewhat abandoned several years ago, but it might offer some utility if Adium is never getting fixed.
I did look for Adium on GitHub and just googling it... but it seems to be a bit difficult to find... Hmmm...
UPDATE: At least I have a few more links... the page for Getting Adium Source is live, and describes how to get the code, and there's a page about Getting the Newest Adium Source as well. In the discussion about this, there's even a note that there exists a BitBucket repo for Adium, where PRs are welcomed.
On the bad news front, the code isn't even close to Xcode 11 ready:
I was going to take a crack at it. I'm fairly good at Objective-C. However, I can't even get Adium to compile with the newest Xcode. What a mess. File encoding issues galore.
So it seems like this may not be an easy fix, but I'll keep looking, and if I get some time, Maybe I'll dive in.
UPDATE: We have a solution... it's in the Javascript for the rendering of the window, and it's in two places:
- /Applications/Adium.app/Contents/Resources/Template.html
- ~/Library/Application Support/Adium 2.0/Message Styles/
Colloquy.AdiumMessageStyle/template.html
where both might have to change these functions:
// Auto-scroll to bottom. Use nearBottom to determine if a scrollToBottom // is desired. function nearBottom() { //return ( document.body.scrollTop >= ( document.body.offsetHeight - // ( window.innerHeight * 1.2 ) ) ); return 1; } function scrollToBottom() { window.scrollTo(0, document.body.scrollHeight); //document.body.scrollTop = document.body.offsetHeight; }
If you just fix the one in the app bundle, that's not enough, but you have to fix him. And then you need to fix the one in the Message Style as that's the one that's actually used. Once both are updated to working code, a restart of the app gets the scrolling back into action! 🙂