[matt2e]

What changed

In Messages → channel → ⋯ Channel actions → View channel details, the Description row now renders through MessageMarkdown, the same renderer messages use, instead of plain text.

• URLs, Buzz links and #channel references are real links for every viewer: owners, admins and plain members. #name only links when it exactly matches a channel name, including case.
• Bold, italics and other Markdown render, instead of showing raw ** / _ markers.
• Only the Description label and its pencil open Edit channel details. Clicking the description text no longer opens the editor. The pencil still reveals on row hover, the label is a 24px target, and the row has no hover fill. "No description" and "Not available" stay plain text. Members and Channel ID keep their whole-row actions.
• The panel's Escape handler now has ThreadPanel's guard: it skips events that are already handled or that come from a portalled layer. A description link's context menu or preview card can't close the panel.

Link safety is the same as in messages: raw HTML is skipped, only Buzz, profile and http(s) URLs pass safeLinkUrl, images render as alt text, and external links get target=_blank rel="noopener noreferrer".

Why

Before this change, the description was plain text, so its URLs and #channel references couldn't be followed. For owners and admins it was worse: the Edit button covered the whole row with an ::after overlay, so clicking a URL in the description opened Edit channel details. docs/channels.md documented that whole-row behaviour on purpose, and this PR updates it. Lifting the links above the overlay was rejected, because DESIGN.md says to "keep an independent row action outside the row's primary click target". The label-only SettingsDetail variant follows that rule.

Scope

This PR covers channel details only. ⌘K and the join notice are left alone on purpose. Unjoined channels still show only "Public channel · not joined" in ⌘K, and the join notice still says only "Join channel to send messages". Showing the description there edits the same lines as #2333 (member counts in channel results) and #2301 (joining read-only spaces), so it will be a separate follow-up PR stacked on those two. BuzzLinkPreview is also out of scope (see Open points).

Before / after

Both sides ran the same Playwright script against the same fixture, viewport (1280×800), light theme and timeline. Before is 0b2dfbf988 (this branch's base). After is 8e1ffa8dcc; the last commit only changes tests. The fixture description is **R2 ops** on-call. Runbook: https://example.test/r2-runbook · escalate in #Beta · _quiet hours after 22:00 UTC_.

description-before-after.mp4

Each side gets the same clicks at the same moment. Before: clicking the URL (11.4s) and #Beta (15.9s) both open "Edit channel details". After: the URL opens a new window, #Beta goes to the Beta channel, and only the Description label (21.7s) opens the editor. The pointer, red click dot and action captions come from Playwright's showActions and are not app UI.

Pointer resting on "on-call". Before: raw ** and _ markers, the URL as plain text wrapping at its hyphen, and the whole row greyed because the row is one button. After: bold text, underlined URL and #Beta links, italics, and only the pencil next to "Description", with no row fill.

Before (0b2dfbf988)	After (8e1ffa8dcc)

Full-window stills behind the side-by-side image, captured losslessly with page.screenshot at the same moment (no pointer overlay).

Commits

1. fix(channels): link the description in channel details (43db4ea): ChannelSettingsPanel renders a non-empty description with MessageMarkdown, using a synthetic row, the session's reference directory and the page's openLink / canOpenLink. ChannelsPage passes the session and link handlers. A new label-only SettingsDetail variant drops the whole-row overlay for Description. CSS and docs/channels.md are updated, and Vitest and browser cases are added.
2. fix(channels): tighten the linked description row in channel details (8e1ffa8): follow-ups from the first AI review (below).
3. test(channels): prove the description row neither grows nor highlights (fce07e4): follow-ups from the second AI review (below). Test-only.

AI review follow-ups

First review of 43db4ea found no blockers and five polish suggestions. All five, plus the Escape guard, landed in 8e1ffa8:

• Moved useReferenceDirectory and the synthetic row into a small ChannelDescription component. It mounts only for a non-empty description with a session and link handler. Profile and channel-list snapshots no longer re-render the whole panel and its editor surface for DM, solo or empty-description channels.
• Dropped aria-description from the label-only Edit button. It made screen readers read the raw Markdown source right before the rendered value.
• Gave the label a 24px minimum target, as DESIGN.md asks for inline targets, with a negative block margin so the row doesn't move. The pencil reveals on row hover again, including under reduced motion, but only the label takes the click.
• Set line-height: inherit on the description cell, so it lines up with Members and Channel ID instead of using message line height.
• Restored "no animation for reduced motion" in the Channel ID docs, and described the row-hover reveal and the label target.
• Guarded the panel's Escape handler like ThreadPanel's.

Second review of 8e1ffa8 found no merge blockers and confirmed all six follow-ups. It raised two test-strength suggestions, both applied in fce07e4:

• The 24px label-target check would still have passed if the negative margin-block stopped applying, because the row would just grow. It now checks that the Description value sits at the same offset inside its row as Members' value (40px inside the top border).
• The "no row highlight" check hovered the padding and read the background straight away. It now hovers the value text, waits for the row-hover pencil reveal as proof the row is hovered, then checks the background. It also hovers the label, which catches a highlight rule that loses its label-only exclusion.

Tests

• Vitest (ChannelDetailsEditor.test.tsx): an editor and a member each get link roles, onOpenLink targets, an editor that stays closed on link clicks, and a label that still opens it. ChannelSettingsPanel.test.tsx covers the Escape guard and the missing accessible description.
• Browser case added: "description links" → "an owner's description links open their targets, not the editor" in tests/browser/channel-settings.spec.mjs. It's a browser case because it checks layout: which element gets a click at a given point, the 24px label target, row offsets and hover paint. jsdom can't model any of that.
• Browser case updated: tests/browser/channel-header-menu.spec.mjs now expects the Description row to be label-only (pencil revealed, no row fill). Members still expects a whole-row action. No browser cases were removed.
• Fail-then-pass: the commit 1 Vitest and browser cases fail on 0b2dfbf988. The commit 2 Escape and accessible-description assertions fail on 43db4ea. Each commit 3 assertion fails under a deliberate CSS break in Chromium and WebKit; for example, removing the margin gives 44 vs 39.98.

Checks run

On fce07e4 (the PR head), locally on a Blox workstation:

• typecheck, lint, design checks and Biome: pass
• Vitest on src/bundled/channels: pass (1,000 tests across 60 files)
• tests/browser/channel-settings.spec.mjs and tests/browser/channel-header-menu.spec.mjs: pass in Chromium and WebKit (18 runs)

Not run:

• The full browser suite.
• Any checks against current main. This branch is based on 0b2dfbf988. git merge-tree shows a clean merge with main, but main has since changed docs/channels.md, Channels.module.css, ChannelsPage.tsx and channel-header-menu.spec.mjs.

Hosted CI is the first run on a merged tree.

Open points

1. The #channel preview card can cover the Description label. Hovering #Beta in the description shows MessageLink's existing channel preview card. The card can hide the "Description" label and pencil, which is now the only way to start editing. In the recording the card had dismissed before the pointer reached the label, so the click worked, but this interaction is new to the panel.
2. The panel now parses descriptions as Markdown, but BuzzLinkPreview still shows them raw. The same channel can look different in the two places; for example, # Ops becomes a heading in the panel. This trade-off was accepted for this PR, and BuzzLinkPreview was out of scope.
3. Not yet tried in the native app. Only Vitest, the browser specs and headless Chromium recordings have exercised this change. The human test step below is still pending.

How to test

1. Open a channel you own. Choose ⋯ Channel actions → Edit channel details and set the description to **Ops** runbook: https://example.com · see #<another channel's exact name> · _quiet hours_.
2. Choose ⋯ Channel actions → View channel details. Expected: bold and italics render, and the URL and #channel are underlined links. Hovering the row shows the pencil next to "Description" but doesn't fill the row.
3. Click the URL. Expected: it opens in the browser, and the editor doesn't open.
4. Click the #channel link. Expected: it goes to that channel.
5. Go back, reopen details, and click the "Description" label. Expected: Edit channel details opens.
6. Repeat steps 2–4 as a plain member. Expected: the same links, and no pencil.

🤖 Generated with Claude Code

[kazemek21]

Kyle reviewed this PR and the Nexus review-tracker notes and approved with no comments.

Posted by Codex (gpt-6.1-sol) on behalf of kylez.