matrix-spec-proposals/content/client-server-api/modules/typing_notifications.md

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module	30

Typing Notifications

Users may wish to be informed when another user is typing in a room. This can be achieved using typing notifications. These are ephemeral events scoped to a room_id. This means they do not form part of the Event Graph but still have a room_id key.

Events

{{% event event="m.typing" %}}

Client behaviour

When a client receives an m.typing event, it MUST use the user ID list to REPLACE its knowledge of every user who is currently typing. The reason for this is that the server does not remember users who are not currently typing as that list gets big quickly. The client should mark as not typing any user ID who is not in that list.

It is recommended that clients store a boolean indicating whether the user is typing or not. Whilst this value is true a timer should fire periodically every N seconds to send a typing HTTP request. The value of N is recommended to be no more than 20-30 seconds. This request should be re-sent by the client to continue informing the server the user is still typing. As subsequent requests will replace older requests, a safety margin of 5 seconds before the expected timeout runs out is recommended. When the user stops typing, the state change of the boolean to false should trigger another HTTP request to inform the server that the user has stopped typing.

{{% http-api spec="client-server" api="typing" %}}

Security considerations

Clients may not wish to inform everyone in a room that they are typing and instead only specific users in the room.