1691255 - Once a recipient has been entered, unable to edit that recipient or to copy-paste from it

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1602901

(Thunderbird :: Message Compose Window, defect)

Description

[Alain Knaff]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:78.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/78.0

Steps to reproduce:

1. Click "Write" to compose a new message
2. Enter a recipient ([e-mail])
3. Click into message area to enter a message
4. Click into To: field again to fix a typo (should be [e-mail])

Actual results:

Recipient is framed with a weird box that prevents me from doing any edit on it.

I can't select parts of the address using standard UI (i.e. swiping it with mouse) either.

I can only select the entire address (using right-click->copy), or delete the entire address

Expected results:

• I should still be able to click inside the recipient address to fix a typo
• I should still be able to swipe over parts of the address to select parts of it (such as only the domain)

N.B. A much older bug exists with almost the same symptoms: #218269

But that one had long been fixed, and it only recently re-appeared (with the last few weeks, can't tell exactly when).

The elaborate boxes drawn around the recipient addresses hint to me that this is intentional. Please revert that back. There are people who use thunderbird for work, and don't need such clowneries :-(

Comment 1

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

Hey Alain, sorry that the design change in the recipient area has left you puzzled... Please be respectful! We're pretty serious about good UX, and I'm here to keep an extra eye on enterprise UX, so let me assure you that clownery isn't on our agenda! That said, there's always room for improvement, so let's see...

Thunderbird 78 introduced recipient items and multiple recipients per recipient field/row (To/CC/etc.) as an intentional, much-demanded, and carefully crafted design change in Bug 440377 - so we're not going to revert that. We are however still working on improving the UX.

To edit a recipient item:

• double-click on the recipient you want to edit
• or select recipient (mouse or keyboard), then press Enter (F2 also works on Windows/Linux).
• also note that recipient items now have a convenient context menu to act on one or multiple selected recipients (incl. Edit Address)

Please find more information here (only English is guaranteed to have the current content):

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/new-thunderbird-78#w_new-addressing-area
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/addressing-email

• This design change comes with massive UX-efficiency gains especially for enterprise users like yourself. Try changing 10 To recipients to BCC in TB 68, then try the same in TB 78 and you'll see what I'm talking about.
• Having recipient items enables such UX-efficiency gains and protects recipients against accidental changes, as they will always be handled as a unit.
• I think we can safely assume that 'edit recipient' is a less frequent use case than all the other actions on a recipient, which all act on the recipient as a unit (cut/copy/paste/change type/drag/remove).

Further possible improvements wrt the problem reported in comment 0:

• I agree that we should make mouse-editing recipients easier and more intuitive by allowing single-click to edit an already selected recipient item, which will reduce the perceived resistance of items against editing (reported here exactly as foreseen on the bug, so I'll mark this as a duplicate):
  Bug 1602901 - Single left-click on single selected pill should edit
• We should definitely make recipient item action shortcuts discoverable via context menu:
  Bug 1647654 - Show keyboard shortcuts on recipient pill(s) context menu

Comment 2

[Alain Knaff]

To edit a recipient item:... double-click on the recipient you want to edit ...

Yes, these do indeed work. Thanks for the information.

Try changing 10 To recipients to BCC in TB 68, then try the same in TB 78 and you'll see what I'm talking about.

I dunno, I never had problem with that. I would select all 10, and paste them into the new area (BCC), the remove from original. Back when it was still possible to select recipients normally...

We should definitely make recipient item action shortcuts discoverable via context menu:

Yes, indeed, discoverability is the key.

There is a universally accepted way to copy-paste, that most applications respect (even thunderbird and firefox in most places): select by dragging with mouse over text to be selected, and paste using middle button.
However, there are numerous other areas in thunderbird and firefox where this universally accepted gesture DOESN'T work. This here is one example. Another area of frequent non-selectability are the debugging tools in firefox (WebDeveloper->Inspector). It shows HTML on the left hand side, but in appearance impossible to select from it. Like in Thunderbird, select is only available via the right-click menu, for the entire line, and not parts of it. Why?
Same thing for URL's in mails: only selectable, as a whole, using rightclick. Attempting to do it the usual way (dragging accross it) gets mis-interpreted as click, and URL is visited. Potentially very dangerous if this is a phishing and/or scam mail.
Or the title of Todo-List items in Lightning (in read-only view). Oddly enough, in an edit window it works.

Couldn't we get all of these fixed? Or is this related to that other bug ("tab tearing") where simple clicks often get misinterpreted as drag operations? If so, I'd say, fix that bug (by getting mouse coordinates from the button-down and button-up events themselves, rather than querying the X server separately!), and allow drag operations where they make sense!

Comment 3

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

(In reply to Alain Knaff from comment #2)

Try changing 10 To recipients to BCC in TB 68, then try the same in TB 78 and you'll see what I'm talking about.

I dunno, I never had problem with that. I would select all 10

Yeah, we all tend to glorify the past, alas - you cannot select 10 recipient addresses simultaneously in TB 68. You can only select one recipient at a time. So whatever actions you want to do in TB 68, multiply them by the number of your recipients. Not so in TB 78, where selecting multiple recipients is a snap, and then you can just act on all of them in one step.

Back when it was still possible to select recipients normally...

Well, in TB 68 each recipient was in it's own textbox, and now each recipient is in its own item box. The only difference is 1 little extra step to get into edit mode, after that, you can select text like before. Btw, Ctrl+C on selected recipient(s) will copy.
Can you explain what you typically do with a partial selection of a single recipient address? I don't think that's a frequent use case.

There is a universally accepted way to copy-paste, that most applications respect (even thunderbird and firefox in most places): select by dragging with mouse over text to be selected, and paste using middle button.

That's a LINUX-only feature. Never heard of such for windows. Btw you can delete selected recipients with middle mouse button.

However, there are numerous other areas in thunderbird and firefox where this universally accepted gesture DOESN'T work. This here is one example.

Please file a separate bug for that and CC me and Alex, if that's an established pattern on Linux, we should try to implement it.

Another area of frequent non-selectability are the debugging tools in firefox (WebDeveloper->Inspector). It shows HTML on the left hand side, but in appearance impossible to select from it. Like in Thunderbird, select is only available via the right-click menu, for the entire line, and not parts of it. Why?

That's out of scope for this bug. (You can actually double-click to select parts; otherwise the reason is that the UI is optimized for navigation and acting on the entire element as opposed to being a copyshop for HTML fragments).

Same thing for URL's in mails: only selectable, as a whole, using rightclick. Attempting to do it the usual way (dragging accross it) gets mis-interpreted as click, and URL is visited. Potentially very dangerous if this is a phishing and/or scam mail.
Or the title of Todo-List items in Lightning (in read-only view). Oddly enough, in an edit window it works.

Off-topic again. Dragging from the middle of a link will drag the entire link, which is much more useful behaviour. You can copy link location and trim that after pasting, which isn't much different wrt effort. I think we need to appreciate that text selection cannot always be the prioritized use case.

Couldn't we get all of these fixed? Or is this related to that other bug ("tab tearing") where simple clicks often get misinterpreted as drag operations? If so, I'd say, fix that bug (by getting mouse coordinates from the button-down and button-up events themselves, rather than querying the X server separately!), and allow drag operations where they make sense!

Not related to this bug (you can share a bug number).

Comment 4

[Alain Knaff]

Yeah, we all tend to glorify the past

I know, all was not better in the past, but unfortunately we do observe a certain amount of bitrot in many applications over time, which is sad. A pet peeve: broken highlighting of selected text (which stays highlighted even when no longer selected), which over the years crept into more and more applications :-(

Can you explain what you typically do with a partial selection of a single recipient address? I don't think that's a frequent use case.

Why would I have to explain each case where I want to copy-paste text? Shouldn't it be the other way round: if features are removed, it should be explained why they were considered harmful.

But in any case: sending a mail to multiple recipients under one domain. It can be handy to enter the first recipient, select its domain, and paste it after the others. In my other examples given (HTML text in Inspector), it's even more frequent: getting image URL's out of pages with broken HTML. Todo lists: sometimes task title may contain an URL, or a text snippet that I would want to send to somebody. All of these I noticed, because at some point I had a concrete need, and then I saw that it was blocked :-(

That's a LINUX-only feature. Never heard of such for windows.

I made a conscious choice of choosing Linux. Please don't change it into windows on me. I have (many) reasons why I DONT'T want windows. If you make Linux behave like windows, you might attract a couple of new users, but you will rob many more existing users the reason why they chose Linux in the first place.

[HTML Inspector]
You can actually double-click to select parts

Double-click, and then single click. Yeah, just noticed. But still limited. Only allows to select between tags, not easily within tags (such as an attribute value), or even across tags.

reason is that the UI is optimized for navigation

I never liked these "optimized for such and such browser" web pages either. Please spare us this mindset :-(

... trim that after pasting ...

Yeah, that's what I ended up doing when encountering such cases. However, why should I have an intermediary text editor open just to trim down selections from thunderbird and firefox, when most other programs allow me to select just what I needed?

[tab tearing]

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=727420

You can trim that if you want :-)