Table of Contents

Matrix

This is just the start page of the Matrix documentation, have a look at More Documentation section at the bottom.

If you have questions about Encryption have a look at

We are running a Matrix instance. Go to meet.physik.fu-berlin.de to use the web client, where you can log in with your regular Physics account credentials.

Matrix is an instant messaging protocal, and is accessed by using a client. Analogously to how email is a protocol, and Gmail is a client. Like with email, there are many clients for Matrix. Different people can use different clients to contact each other. A good client to start using Matrix with is Element. You can use the web version of Element at meet.physik.fu-berlin.de, or use other versions of Android Clients, iOS clients or Desktop clients (Windows, MacOS, Linux) or any other Matrix client to matrix.physik.fu-berlin.de

Our Matrix server is not federated with the rest of the Matrix ecosystem, due to unresolved privacy questions, but we are giving access to external collaborators upon request.

First Steps

When you first log in at meet.physik.fu-berlin.de, you will see something like this

The important parts of the screen are these

  1. is the user menu
  2. is the bar of communities you are a part of
  3. is the button to join/make a room, and is on top of the (currently empty) list of rooms we are participating in
  4. is the button to start a direct message session with another user, and is on top of the (currently empty) list of direct conversations we are having
  5. Is a search box used to find a specific room/person in your contacts. The compass icon to the right of it is to explore public rooms.

We will now look at all of these in turn.

Direct Messages and Rooms

When you press the button to start a direct message (the plus button in the People tab) labelled with (4). You are presented with If you use Matrix for a bit longer it will be filled with suggestions, but for a new user, it is empty. In the box you can type the name or ZEDAT account of the person you are searching for. Press Go to invite the person to chat.

In this example we get an invite for such a direct message session. It pops up in the space where all our conversations are listed. By clicking on it we can choose whether to join or reject the conversation

If we join, we end up in the messaging window and can start to chat. For more information what Matrix allows have a look at Beyond Text.

Let's use this window to explain what we can see

At the bottom is the message box where you can enter your messages. To the right of the message box there are five buttons highlighted in red for (from left to right)

The latter will add a widget to a Jitsi room on our Jitsi instance on top of the message space if you have more than two people in a room or directly start a video call if you are only two.

Furthermore, there are another four buttons on top of the screen highlighted in red and labelled 2. From left to right:

Rooms

A room is a group chat. You can create a room by pressing the plus button beside the rooms tab labelled by (3). Here you have the option to choose a room name, and whether the room will be public (searchable) or not. Once the room is created, you can invite individuals to it by pressing on the information button within the room, clicking invite, and then typing in their names.

To create a private room, just give it a name and optionally a topic and press Create Room. At first you will be alone, but you can invite more people via the user list.

If you press the "Make this room public" toggle, the window changes to and will allow you to give the room a permanent identifier, the room alias, which uniquely identifies the room.

But what if you just want to join an exisiting public room. The Explore button (compass icon) (5) has you covered. When you click it you get a window where you can search the list of public rooms by name and room alias.

One such room is ZEDV-Support, where the Physics IT service answers support questions and generally interacts with users. It looks like a direct chat session, only with more people, because that's what it is.

Beyond Text

In the Matrix client we provide, you can do more than write simple text (and uploading files and images). You can style your text with Markdown, including Hyperlinks and syntaxhighlighted code. You can also write LaTeX code for math inside dollar signs, e.g. $\LaTeX$ for inline math and $$\LaTeX$$ for display math.

When you hover over one of your messages you get a little context menu, that we will explain now. The buttons are (from left to right) quick reactions, reply, edit and more options

Edits

Sometimes you have a typo and would like to fix it, with Matrix you can, just press the edit button on the message mouseover.

Before

After

Delete Messages

Have you sent something to the wrong person? You can delete messages via the delete options on the more options (three dots) message mouseover.

Before

After

Replies

Want to add some context that has already scrolled past in a busy room? The reply function has got you covered, just press the reply button on the message mouseover.

Tabcompletion

One last feature, names tabcomplete. If you start typing @ followed by the name or username of of a user, a little menu will pop up where you can choose the name by clicking or via the tab key if you are down to a single choice

This results in a mention that is highlighted for the user you mentioned.

Other things that tabcomplete are room names (starting with a #), emojis (starting with a :) and communities (starting with a +).

Further Steps

User Settings (Changing Your Name)

In the user menu (1) you can set many options. {{ :services:matrix:settings.png?direct&1000 |}}

Among these settings are whether and how you want to receive desktop notifications, the theme you want (currently we only have the defaults light and dark), but also how your name is displayed and what your profile picture is.

If you change your name or profile picture, other users will see it right away, but the menu will only show it once you log out and back in.

You can also change your name and avatar on a per-room basis. This works only with commands. To change your name, type /myroomnick <name>. To change your avatar in the room, use /myroomavatar, then you will be prompted to choose a file from your computer which will be your new avatar.

Leaving a room

You can use the context menu for rooms

Or you can just type /part as a message into the room.

Getting people into a room

You can directly link to a (public) room via the information button on the top right Press "Share room", and you will be presented with multiple means of sharing the room with someone

Spaces

This feature used to be called communities before, but has been supplanted by spaces as of late May 2021.

You might wonder, "I have a group of people, but we also have a set of topics and a single room for that might be confusing!" Or you might wonder "Some of my rooms and conversations belong to this one thing, I'd like to group them together somehow." That is what spaces are for, they can group people and rooms, that means they are a tool to organise rooms and people by topic. When creating a space, you can add existing rooms, direct conversations and users to it. You can always add more rooms and people later and both rooms and people can be members of arbitrarily many spaces, so you can group them however you like.

Unfortunately which spaces exist on the server is currently not searchable, so you will need to be invited to join an existing space. This should become more comfortable soon™️.

Spaces are handled via the sidebar on the far left of your screen. It might look something like this.

This shows the sidebar of an account with two spaces (with initials T and F). Clicking on either of them will narrow the list of direct conversations and rooms to only those that belong to that space. The button at the top will return you to the view where you see all your direct conversations and rooms you are a member of (the Home screen). The bottom at the bottom will create a new space.

By default rooms that are part of a space are not shown in the list of rooms on the Home screen. If you want a room, that is part of a space, shown there you will need to either

  1. set it as a favourite via the three button menu when you hover over its name,
  2. right-click on the Home button and then on Show all rooms, or
  3. enable Show all rooms in Home in the Spaces section of the Preferences

You can also just search for the name of the room in the search box above the list of all your rooms and conversations.

Public Spaces

When you click to create a new space you will be greeted with a small window

You can create public spaces (that - in the future - will be searchable like public rooms) and private spaces. Private spaces are for closed groups or just for your personal usage to organise rooms just the way you like.

If you click to create a public space you will get this small window

where you can set a name and description for the space. This dialog is the same when creating a private space.

Afterwards you will be offered to create rooms for that space

If you already have rooms that you want to add to the space and don't want to create new ones, you must delete the suggestions so that the Continue button changes to a Skip for now button.

Afterwards you can add other people to your room either by copying an invite link or via the usual dialog to add people to a room.

You can always add rooms and people to your space later.

Finally you will land on the landing page of your space

Here you can add more rooms and people to your space or change its name and description and whether it is public or private (via the settings menu that you can reach via the gear symbol)

Private Spaces

You can create private spaces for your groups or projects or just for yourself. That's the first question you will be asked when creatin a private space

If you press Just me here, you will be shown a list of all the rooms you are a member of and you can mark them to be added to your private space.

if you press Me and my teammates you will be shown a dialog to invite people

You must invite them via their usernames or skip this step for now, since for our Matrix instance users will not be able to join via app.element.io

Afterwards you will get the same room creation dialog as for public spaces discussed above, where you need to remove the suggested room names if you don't want to create new rooms to skip that step.

If you later decide you want to share your private space with other people, you can always do that and invite people to it. Since the menu to add rooms to spaces is much nicer for personal use private rooms, this is the recommended way to create private spaces and to later invite more users to it instead of going through the general private space creation.

Usage tips

More Documentation