226874 - Navigating folder tree View menu with keyboard could be more effective

Status: NEW

(Thunderbird :: Mail Window Front End, enhancement)

Description

[Mark Shuttleworth]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.6b) Gecko/20031125 Firebird/0.6 StumbleUpon/1.73
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.6b) Gecko/20031125 Firebird/0.6 StumbleUpon/1.73

If you have many folders with similar names, and are trying to navigate down the
list of folders within folders, the current mechanism of jumping to the next
item that starts with the key pressed is inefficient. It would be better to
remember what keys have been pressed in the current level, and search for an
item that starts with that sequence of keystrokes. Typing "ka" would jump past
all the "kilroy" entries, straight to the "karl" entry.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Click the File toolbar button.
2. Type the first letter of a folder. The selection jumps to the first entry
that starts with that letter.
3. Now type the second letter of the folder you want.

Actual Results:  
The selection jumps to the first folder that starts with the second letter typed
when you type the second letter.

Expected Results:  
THe selection should jump to the first folder that starts with the two letters
that have been typed.

For example, say you have four folders:

 Anne
 John
 Jill
 Jack

Currently, if you press J then A you will end up with Anne selected. The
selction will go to John when you press J, then to Anne when you press A. It
would be easier if pressing JA would select first John then Jack.

Comment 1

[Rudolf Vavruch]

At the moment this doesn't seem to work at all in Thunderbird 1.0.2, I can't
even jump to a folder by typing the first letter of it's name.

Nonetheless for keyboard orientated users functionality like this is vital.

Comment 2

[James Teh [:Jamie]]

(In reply to comment #1)
> At the moment this doesn't seem to work at all in Thunderbird 1.0.2, I can't
> even jump to a folder by typing the first letter of it's name.
This still seems to be true in the latest snapshot (version 1.6a1 (20051010)). 
However, in the list of steps to reproduce:
> 1. Click the File toolbar button.
How does this relate to the folder tree? Could I be missing something here? 
(Screen readers can't currently seem to access the toolbars, so I'm not sure, 
but I haven't found they have been needed so far.)