154176 - scroll to folder by typing prefix of folder name

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 117729

(SeaMonkey :: MailNews: Message Display, enhancement)

Description

[Michael Witbrock]

I have dozens of folders, some of which I use often enough to memorise.
At presennt, when filing, I need to scroll to the right folder and drop the
message there. This visual search is slow (it accounts for a total of about 1/2
and hour a day for me, I'd guess).  This task would be enormously faster if I
could scroll to the correct folder by typing a prefix (multicharacter, in
general, not just a single letter) prefix of the folder name. 

e.g. typing  b a n     would scroll to a folder called "banana"


in case it matters, lotus notes does this, and that's the single good thing
about it.

Comment 1

[Henrik Lynggaard Hansen]

I'm not sure I see the real potential here. In my folder view most of my folders
begin with the same set of characters like

dk.edb....... (6)
netscape.public.mozilla.... (10)
Inbox.. (2)

How should this be handled ?

Comment 2

[witbrock]

Well, Mark Shuttleworth seems to see the virtue of this, and has offered a
bounty for someone to fix it. 
Seee: http://www.markshuttleworth.com/bounty.html

I quote from someone who shares my pain: "Thunderbird Message Filing Quick Access
It takes too darn long for me to file a message. I use quite deep nesting on my
IMAP folders because I have hundreds of mail folders. To file a message in the
correct folder I have to click on the icon to file a message (or right click on
the message) then click on a whole series of nested folders, for example:
[e-mail], Inbox, mail, people, m, megan elliot. That's seven clicks, all
of which have to be accurate, to get the message filed. If a click goes astray,
the message is filed in the wrong place. To make things worse, the mouse has to
be moved carefully through that hierarchy of menus, or the whole thing collapses
and one has to start all over again. It drives me nuts. I am looking for
proposals for programmers who will (a) enable key-stroke based access to the
existing functionality so that message filing can be done entirely without the
mouse, and (b) extend the current system with a sort of "folder type-ahead find"
so that I could hit a hot key and start typing the name of the folder I want,
and have it produce a smart drop-down list of matching folders, allowing me
quickly to select the correct one and file the message there, all without using
a mouse. This should be done as a Thunderbird extension."

Comment 3

[Alfonso Martinez]

This one looks like a dup of Bug 117729.

Comment 4

[Asa Dotzler [:asa]]

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 117729 ***