1631690 - Make selecting text and background colors easier/more efficient

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Thunderbird :: Message Compose Window, enhancement)

Description

[Matthew Jurgens]

Attachment: Sample Dropped Down Toolbar Button.png

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:75.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/75.0

Steps to reproduce:

Currently the method for changing the color of text when composing a message is too cumbersome. It takes a minimum of 3 clicks to change the text color even if you want the same color you previously used, with even more clicks to select a new color.

Expected results:

It would be great if the toolbar buttons for foreground (text) color and background color were separated. This would then allow for a single click of the toolbar button to immediately apply the last selected color to the current selection.

The toolbar button would need to be changed to have an optional dropdown so that the user could also select other colours. This would allow for a color change in two clicks.

Microsoft Outlook (and other Office products) have a excellent implementation of highly efficient foreground and background color buttons.

Comment 1

[Matthew Jurgens]

Attachment: Sample Single Click Separate Toolbar Buttons

Comment 2

[Enrique]

Multiple users report usability problems with the (font/backgroupd) color picker.
Some related issues: 1710296, 1702866, 1631690, 1610546, 1584772, 1710296.

I also experience tedious, inefficient color picking on Xubuntu and would love to see an improvement.
I do understand the benefits of using the OS color picker in Thunderbird.

It should be possible to add a basic, simple & efficient color picker inside Thunderbird, which also contains a "More colors..." button that opens the OS color picker.
That might retain the best of both worlds ?

• Create a separate font color button & a separate background color button
• These buttons show the last selected color + a dropdown beside.
  • click on the last selected color: immediately applies that color (one click)
  • click on the dropdown: shows a usefull basic color palette + custom chosen colors by end user (retained after closing Thundebird) + "more colors" button
  • the "more colors" option might then show the OS color picker
  • selecting a color in the dropdown, immediately applies that color to the selection and sets that color in the button

This might solve the questions of multiple people.

2 good examples:

• Outlook color picking
  https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/attachment.cgi?id=9141960
• Evolution color picking
  https://i.ibb.co/6Jg7NZ4/colorpicker-evolution.png

Thanks from a longtime Thunderbird user on Xubuntu.