thanks for the bug report. what do you mean by 'hide groups' ? do you mean an option to hide a certain group of contacts to be shown in the contact list?

Hide the names of groups "Ungrouped" ...

*** Bug 631467 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

I would like to support this bug in the sense of bug 631467.

Quote:
This enhancement would make it simple to:
-Show: the groups as it already does, making it easy to separate your contacts.
-Hide: the groups so that there are no group labels in the Contact list and
they are all treated as if they are in the same group and sorted appropriately.


My motivation:
For me personally this is a major usability flaw, it actually prevents me from moving to empathy permanently. That is because I use IM like this:
- I want to IM someone (one person or several people)
- I display my contact list and 
- I scan the list visually and look for people who are online for my purpose

Note that I'm not comfortable to put people into groups for this purpose, I would rather see names and select them from the list. But I use groups to keep some context, where this contact comes from (hence my list is broken into several groups by Empathy).

Thanks.
Oleg

I agree with the suggestion of Oleg. The ability to display all contacts as if in one group (I'm aware of type-to-search) is very useful. 

The ability to change how contacts are grouped is related and also useful, though a different ticket.

Mockups of the Chat application doesn't display groups so we should add an option to ignore them.

*** Bug 661458 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Ignoring of groups will make Empathy close to application that could to be used, most of users have multi accounts and user list is huge - grouping force us remember to what account group person belongs :( - weird.

Created attachment 202128 [details] [review]
Add a gsetting key to show/hide groups

This patch adds a gsetting key to control groups showing. Groups are still showed by default because that's what one may expect from an IM contact list. There is no UI to change it, the "View" menu is already pretty crowded.

*** Bug 669720 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Attachment 202128 [details] pushed as b02e166 - Add a gsetting key to show/hide groups

Exciting!

I was testing my patch a little (when it looked similar to this, but written between varying states of consciousness), and my code on github now is a little different than my attachment on bug #669720. This approach works great, but it also disables groups added by Empathy itself rather than the IM service. And those, such as the Favourite People feature, could still be desirable. If we explicitly add that group (and make sure it appears on top), the visuals go all wonky: there's no separation between the last contact in the group and the next contact in the list.

I ended up changing my approach to always use the fallback groups, so most contacts appear under Unfiled, some under Favourites, and some under People Nearby. Another way might be to change the sorting so favourited contacts go at the top of the list when groups are turned off.

Something to look at, anyway. Thanks for adding this feature :)