1304365 - Configurable default mail composition text formatting

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1250051

(Thunderbird :: Message Compose Window, defect)

Description

[Andrei Boros]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:47.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/47.0
Build ID: 20160623154057

Steps to reproduce:

Compose a new mail message.

Take notice of the text formatting style on the toolbar.


Actual results:

Since a few versions ago, the default text formatting style has changed from "Body text" to "Paragraph".

Now this change may be welcome for some people and less for others. 


Expected results:

This is a feature request: 
Make the default formatting style configurable either in Options GUI or via about:config

It is annoying to have to change formatting by hand every time one writes a new mail.

Comment 1

[Jorg K (CEST = GMT+2)]

This is pretty much covered by bug 1271835.

Comment 2

[Jorg K (CEST = GMT+2)]

Sorry, wrong duplicate: Here we go: Bug 1250051.

You can switch this off. Please read here
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/new-thunderbird-45#w_mail-composition
on how to disable this option.

Quote:
The Thunderbird composition window now functions more like a word processor in
that pressing the "Enter" key inserts a new paragraph, pressing "Shift+Enter"
inserts a new line. This new behavior can be switched off in the Tools >
Options > Composition > General tab.

Comment 3

[Andrei Boros]

Sorry, but that checkbox in Tools>Options>Composition>General is totally confusing.

It reads: "When using paragraph format, the enter key creates a new paragraph". 
If this option changes the default style between "body text" and "paragraph" then this label must be changed.

In it's current form is very misleading because it indicates behaviour changes *only* when paragraph style has been selected by some means (automatic or manual).

Reading this label makes you presume that if you uncheck it, while using paragraph style, your first style will be paragraph, then enter key will go to next line, like shift-enter. Wait, what?

Comment 4

[Andrei Boros]

The label should either be updated to something like:
"Use paragraph formatting by default"
or changed to a drop down, identical to the style selector in composition window, so that the user can choose his/her default style.

Comment 5

[Jorg K (CEST = GMT+2)]

Yes, we recognised that the label was suboptimal. We've changed it to
Use Paragraph format instead of Body Text by default
in bug 1273841. Try it in TB 49 beta, it's even in the release notes:
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/49.0beta/releasenotes/