Is your suggestion related to a problem? Please describe.

I was making a rather large edit to a message today and realised that I wanted to place a link from another room in it. I switched to the other room, copied the link, and switched back - only to realise the edit I was making has been completely lost.

Since I'm used to Element saving the composer state when switching between rooms, it didn't even occur to me that the state of a message mid-edit would be wiped when clicking on another room. I then had to re-edit the message from scratch, this time copying the message to a text editor just-in-case.

Describe the solution you'd like.

I'd like the edit state of a message to be preserved in some way, or otherwise for the app to prompt you before you try to click off to another room. Preferably the former though, as I could see people blindly clicking through a warning modal in order to get to what they need to.

As a basic first version, it'd be nice if the situation was:

• I edit a message
• Click off to another room
• Come back and go "oh shoot!"
• Try to edit the same message
• The in-progress edit is still there. "Phew!"

This seems the easiest as you'd simply need a store of in-progress edits, much as we do with half-written messages in room composer fields.

Past that, it'd be nice if messages in the timeline could somehow be highlighted, or a dot could appear on the edit icon for a message, or a little pencil icon could appear next to a message... essentially something to indicate that you have a pending edit on a message, which would inform the user that their edit isn't lost. Element's saved it for you 🙂

Describe alternatives you've considered.

Opening up a separate app, copying the text of the edited message into the composer which does save in-progress work. All workarounds really.