368920 - Darken the background for Message Grouping (Group by Sort) headers

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Thunderbird :: Theme, enhancement)

Description

[Karel Koubek]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.1) Gecko/20061204 Firefox/2.0.0.1
Build Identifier: 2 pre (2007013104)

The 'Group by Sort' headers are quite illegible in the current implementation - their color blend with the surrounding gray lines and it's difficult to quickly orientate between them.

Reproducible: Always



Expected Results:  
To help the matter, darker gray tone could be used for the headers, or even some light pastel color.
I would also retain only one color for the headers, irrespective of the header position between lines - further helps orientation (The darker gray used for headers between two white lines is just fine and should be default for all headers).

Comment 1

[Karel Koubek]

Attachment: Current appearance of headers

Comment 2

[Steve Simms]

Confirming.

Comment 3

[Vincent (caméléon)]

Same problem here: header should have a different  background than the grey background use for the other lines (I attach another print-screen).

Comment 4

[Vincent (caméléon)]

Attachment: Header in Thunderbird 3.0.4 are not very clear

Comment 5

[Vincent (caméléon)]

Still there in Lanikai/3.1b1 :-(

Comment 6

[Karel Koubek]

As a stop-gap solution I propose the following user CSS that I've been using since the Thunderbird 2.x times:

/*Grouped by Sort headers: font */
treechildren::-moz-tree-cell-text(dummy){
  color: #112D94 !important;
}

/*Grouped by Sort headers: background */
treechildren::-moz-tree-row(dummy){
  background: #E2E2E6 !important;
}

For those who don't know - simply create a folder named "chrome" in your profile folder and inside it create a file called userChrome.css with these lines of code. Feel free to change the hex color code to your liking.

Maybe the developers could have a look at this and incorporate it? A black bold text against gray background according to Thunderbird color palette couldn't hurt...

Comment 7

[alta88]

Yes, the current #F0F0F0 on win and linux is barely visible.  But worse, due to the (odd) rule, even that is overridden for grouped view dummy rows, as it doesn't take into account thread parent/group headers where odd/even doesn't apply:

https://dxr.mozilla.org/comm-central/source/mail/themes/linux/mail/mailWindow1.css#362
https://dxr.mozilla.org/comm-central/source/mail/themes/windows/mail/mailWindow1.css#363

Also, the dummy rules here are not being used, since the column name isn't being set in the backend, and can be removed:

https://dxr.mozilla.org/comm-central/source/mail/themes/shared/mail/mailWindow1.css#43

Paenglab, what do you think? Perhaps something more vibrant can be done to those dummy header rows. (I'm doing some work to make grouped view work better).

Comment 8

[alta88]

Attachment: groupedHeaderTheme.patch

A possible color, feel free to override.  Also, the backend is setting the properties correctly, but the rules in /shared are getting overridden later. The 3 toggles don't work right when used in the header row so need to be hidden.

Comment 9

[Richard Marti (:Paenglab)]

Comment on attachment 8654193 [details] [diff] [review]
groupedHeaderTheme.patch

Review of attachment 8654193 [details] [diff] [review]:
-----------------------------------------------------------------

The color is okay. I also thought to use -moz-Dialog before you came with this patch.

The patch doesn't apply on latest trunk. With fixing this and addressing the comments it should get a r+ the next time.

::: mail/themes/linux/mail/mailWindow1.css
@@ +68,5 @@
>    -moz-padding-start: 2px;
>  }
>  
>  treechildren::-moz-tree-row(dummy, selected) {
>    background-color: -moz-Dialog;

Is this still needed? The normal dummy row has now already -moz-Dialog as variable.

::: mail/themes/shared/mail/mailWindow1.css
@@ +60,5 @@
>    -moz-padding-end: 3px;
>  }
>  
>  treechildren::-moz-tree-image(junkStatusCol, dummy) {
> +  list-style-image: none !important;

The correspondentCol is missing.
When you're on this, can you group this selectors together and add comment for what it is? Like:

/* ..... don't show icons on dummy rows ..... */

treechildren::-moz-tree-image(subjectCol, dummy),
treechildren::-moz-tree-image(flaggedCol, dummy),
treechildren::-moz-tree-image(junkStatusCol, dummy) ,
treechildren::-moz-tree-image(correspondentCol, dummy),
treechildren::-moz-tree-image(unreadButtonColHeader, dummy) {
  list-style-image: none !important;
}

::: mail/themes/windows/mail/mailWindow1.css
@@ +63,5 @@
>    -moz-padding-start: 2px;
>  }
>  
>  treechildren::-moz-tree-row(dummy, selected) {
>    background-color: -moz-Dialog;

Again, ist this still needed?

@@ +327,5 @@
>      background-image: url("chrome://messenger/skin/icons/row.png");
>      background-position: bottom;
>      background-repeat: repeat-x;
>    }
> +  #threadTree treechildren::-moz-tree-row(dummy, odd) {

Please a empty line between these rules.

Comment 10

[alta88]

Attachment: groupedHeaderTheme.patch

thanks, rebased and all comments fixed.

Comment 11

[Richard Marti (:Paenglab)]

Comment on attachment 8654531 [details] [diff] [review]
groupedHeaderTheme.patch

Review of attachment 8654531 [details] [diff] [review]:
-----------------------------------------------------------------

Looks good. Thank you for the patch.

Comment 12

[alta88]

Attachment: groupedHeaderTheme2.patch

With all groups collapsed, they look too much the same and harder to differentiate; this adds a separation.

Comment 13

[aleth [:aleth]]

https://hg.mozilla.org/comm-central/rev/972db835c0e756a0b738106d66437302a348bbe2
Bug 368920 - Darken the background for Message Grouping (Group by Sort) headers. r=paenglab

https://hg.mozilla.org/comm-central/rev/b7472e239aa26967f125577a0887fa236b03b5ba
Bug 368920 - Darken the background for Message Grouping (Group by Sort) headers, part2. r=paenglab a=aleth SM CLOSED TREE