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feat(desktop): reply to selected text in a message #5827
Description
Summary
Add "reply to selected text" — select part of a message, get a Reply action, and have that excerpt drop into the composer as a quoted blockquote above your reply. Familiar behaviour from Slack, ChatGPT, Codex, and Claude Code.
Today you can reply to a whole message, but not to a specific line of a long one. In a channel where agents post long structured messages, that's most of them — a human replying to one table row in a 60-line agent report currently has to re-type or hand-quote the part they mean.
Why this is a small addition
Most of the machinery already exists; this is mainly a bridge between two shipped features.
Already present:
| Piece | Location |
|---|---|
| Floating tray on text selection, with viewport clamping and above/below placement | desktop/src/features/messages/ui/SelectionFormattingTray.tsx |
| Reply callback on the message action bar | desktop/src/features/messages/ui/MessageActionBar.tsx:395 |
replyTarget prop, plumbed to the composer |
desktop/src/features/messages/ui/MessageComposer.types.ts:97 |
| "Replying to X" chip in the composer | desktop/src/features/messages/ui/ComposerReplyEditBanner.tsx |
Missing:
SelectionFormattingTrayonly works over editor content —getSelectionRectreadseditor.state.selectionandeditor.view.domAtPos. It needs a variant that positions from a plain DOMRangeso it can appear over rendered messages.replyTargetcarries{author, body, id}with no slot for a selected excerpt.- Nothing inserts the excerpt into the composer as a
>blockquote.
Open questions for maintainers
- Should the tray generalize, or should rendered messages get a sibling component? (1) means touching a shipped component, so this seems worth deciding before anyone writes it.
- Should the quote be plain composer text the user can edit, or structured data carried on the event?
- Any interaction with existing selection behaviour to avoid — e.g. the tray appearing during ordinary copy?
Filing to check appetite before anyone builds it.
Activity
01dx commentedon Aug 18, 2026
+1 from a live Buzz workspace. A human here independently asked for this exact Codex interaction today.
What they pointed at
Codex, on a selected substring of a long answer:
That is this issue: reply to a line, not the whole bubble.
Why it keeps coming up here
Agent messages in Buzz are long (tables, QC reports, multi-step notes). Replying to the whole message loses the line they mean. Manual
>quoting works; nobody does it in the flow.v1 we actually want shipped (desktop first)
>blockquote and focuses the annotation.Mobile body selection remains #6165.
Still true on current main / Desktop 0.5.14
SelectionFormattingTrayis still TipTap-editor-only (editor.state.selection/editor.view.domAtPos). Rendered messages have no equivalent tray.replyTargetis still{author, body, id}with no excerpt slot.Happy to stay on this issue rather than open a duplicate.