1615917 - Allow incremental selection of recipient pills with Ctrl+A

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Thunderbird :: Message Compose Window, enhancement)

Description

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

We want users to love the new recipient area. So let's add value where we can, and be convenient and efficient like never before. :-)

Libre Office has a nifty feature of incremental selection using Ctrl+A from inside a table cell:
First Ctrl+A selects the current cell, next Ctrl+A selects the entire table, another Ctrl+A selects the entire document. Which makes perfect sense, and is easily applicable to our new recipient area.

First Ctrl+A: Select all pills in the currently focused field (e.g. all pills in To: field).
Next Ctrl+A: Select all pills in the entire recipient area (e.g. all pills in To+CC+BCC).

Wow!!! - oh for the efficiency of that. Delete all recipients in one go, copy, cut - you name it.

For ux-error-prevention, we won't extend the selection when you just hold Ctrl+A a little too long. You may hold Ctrl, but it needs another explicit keypress for the A. No risks, pure fun. Enjoy!

Comment 1

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

Attachment: incremental-Ctrl+A-pills.diff

Let's do this! :-)

I also improved some comments along the way, querySelectorAll() returns a nodelist, not an array.

Comment 2

[Alessandro Castellani [:aleca]]

Comment on attachment 9126983 [details] [diff] [review]
incremental-Ctrl+A-pills.diff

Review of attachment 9126983 [details] [diff] [review]:
-----------------------------------------------------------------

Nice, this is useful indeed.
I'm gonna ask a quick feedback to Magnus just in case he can spot any possible issue, but to me this is r+

Comment 3

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

Comment on attachment 9126983 [details] [diff] [review]
incremental-Ctrl+A-pills.diff

Review of attachment 9126983 [details] [diff] [review]:
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::: mail/base/content/mailWidgets.js
@@ +2570,2 @@
>       *
> +     * @return {Nodelist} Nodelist of all selected <mail-address-pill> elements.

NodeList with capital L

Comment 4

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

I'll fix it before committing.

Comment 5

[Pulsebot]

Pushed by [e-mail]:
https://hg.mozilla.org/comm-central/rev/c510f2acfb18
Allow incremental selection of recipient pills with Ctrl+A. ui-r=aleca, r=aleca

Comment 6

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

Awesome. That was quick! Thanks everyone!

My translation engine for Magnus' no-liners said "Cool, clean code, thank you!"

Comment 8

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

Wayne, I think new keyboard shortcuts should always be included in release notes.
More so for this one because it operates incrementally, which will be a bit hard to discover if not advertised:
Press Ctrl+A once to select all recipients of the same type,
press Ctrl+A again to select all recipients of the message.

Keyboard shortcut Ctrl+A will first select all recipients of the same type, then all message recipients.

Comment 9

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Rather than calling out individual changes, I think we could accomplish more by having the release notes state that addressing has changed, and then point to a KB article which describes the entire new functionality, including keyboard shortcuts. Someone will need to create said KB article.