Open Bug 1673796 Opened 4 years ago Updated 3 years ago

Mail/Vertical View/ can't move Message list columns around

Categories

(Thunderbird :: Folder and Message Lists, enhancement)

Thunderbird 83
Unspecified
macOS
enhancement

Tracking

(Not tracked)

UNCONFIRMED

People

(Reporter: macnosy, Unassigned)

References

Details

(Whiteboard: [dupme?])

Attachments

(1 file)

Attached image TB_SS.jpg

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_14_6) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/14.0 Safari/605.1.15

Steps to reproduce:

Using TB 83.0b1 on a 2018 MacBook Pro with OSX 10.14.6
I am using "Vertical View"
and found out that that is NO way of directly controlling the width of the last 2 Message List columns

In the enclosed screen shot,
What finally ended up working was to get the dbl arrow to the left side of the text window to control the text window width & Message list pane size, ...

  1. I tried using the "Restore Column Order" command which moved the Subject column from the far right to the far left which I DID NOT WANT

the web page: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/message-list-columns
SAYS: To move a column, click and drag the column heading to the desired position.

Change that to :
To move a column, click and drag (shuift-click) the column heading to the desired position.

  1. there is no vertical separator between the date and time column

  2. The Config Editor - Totally un-documented like the rest of TB. :-(
    I started programming in 1967 or so on a CDC 6600 supercomputer at NYU/CIMS as a grad student in Mathematics and ended up spending the next 40 - 50 years as a programmer. 12 at Control Data and 15 at Apple among others.
    We were required to document our programs.
    I have spent some time trying to understand the TB code and gave up when I found 3 sets of EQU files for the different parts of it.

Actual results:

See see enclosed screen shot

Expected results:

I wasted an hour or so to finally remind myself that drag = shift-click
and text window width is controlled from the left

Component: Untriaged → Folder and Message Lists
Whiteboard: [dupme?]

(In reply to Steve Jasik from comment #0)

Created attachment 9184151 [details]
TB_SS.jpg

Thanks for the screen shot - that helps a lot.

Steps to reproduce:

Using TB 83.0b1 on a 2018 MacBook Pro with OSX 10.14.6
I am using "Vertical View"
and found out that that is NO way of directly controlling the width of the last 2 Message List columns

Does this reproduce for you? I am unable to reproduce with the same columns as your screen shot, using 90.0b3 on OSX 11.r

In the enclosed screen shot,
What finally ended up working was to get the dbl arrow to the left side of the text window to control the text window width & Message list pane size, ...

  1. I tried using the "Restore Column Order" command which moved the Subject column from the far right to the far left which I DID NOT WANT

the web page: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/message-list-columns
SAYS: To move a column, click and drag the column heading to the desired position.

Change that to :
To move a column, click and drag (shuift-click) the column heading to the desired position.

Thanks for the info. It may help in this buggy situation, but that is not standard combination - it should absolutely work without shift.

  1. there is no vertical separator between the date and time column

Perhaps a symptom of this situation you are in.

  1. The Config Editor - Totally un-documented like the rest of TB. :-(
    I started programming in 1967 or so on a CDC 6600 supercomputer at NYU/CIMS as a grad student in Mathematics and ended up spending the next 40 - 50 years as a programmer. 12 at Control Data and 15 at Apple among others.
    We were required to document our programs.

Not sure what config editor has to do with this?

Are you referring to user doc or source code doc? If the former, UI should normally not need documentation - UI should generally be simple enough and functional well enough to not need documentation.

If the later, see https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/get-involved/#documentation

In any event, config editor is core code not controlled by Thunderbird

Flags: needinfo?(macnosy)
OS: Unspecified → macOS
See Also: → 1711307
Whiteboard: [dupme?] → [closeme 2021-07-15][dupme?]
  1. I will be using 10.14.6 for a long as I an on my 2019 MBP as I don't want to shell out money on a monthly basis for a 64 bit copy of Photoshop which I use infrequently
    After some of the problems I settled on using 88.0b3 and am reasonably happy with it as it is a PITA to try and go backward

Documentation - about a year or so ago when I first started using TB, I wanted to change the "get mail" (from the server) command from Command Y to Cmd-M only to find our that the EQU for Cmd M appeared in THREE different files.
As I pointed out I did software for Apple for 15 years and EQUs for a given thing only appeared in ONE place.
After that I gave up on trying to modify TB.
I got the sad story of TB moving from the Bay Area to Canada & back from a former employee at a Hackers Conference a few years ago.

As for documentation:
both user & internal documentation would make it possible for new people to join the project
and understand what the config editor options control

Flags: needinfo?(macnosy)
Whiteboard: [closeme 2021-07-15][dupme?] → [dupme?]

@Reporter,
Does this still reproduce when using version 91? And if you resolved the problem, what was the solution?

Flags: needinfo?(macnosy)

Wayne,
After some dubious experiences with TB I have stayed happily on V88.0b3 for the last few months .

I do need instructions in how to save and go back to the old version before updating to a newer version so that I can go backward if necessary.
That or the update process should have a "Save old version" option built into the update process.

I can't figure out how to add another screen shot so I sent it to your email
As it is a year old, I no longer remember how I solved my problem.

As to my comments about documentation and coding, they still hold and the config editor options should be documented
as I would like to know how to set the text column width in messages I write as I don't know where to look for it among other things.
One way to do it is to explicitly show the EQU names so one can search for them in the code.

It would also be nice to have a culumative change history which shows ALL changes tio ALL versions.
I did that for my software (MacNosy & The Debugger) and I expect no less for SW written by others.

Flags: needinfo?(macnosy)
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