1817605 - Can't select multiple folders in new folder tree

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Thunderbird :: Folder and Message Lists, defect, P3)

Description

[PS]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/110.0.0.0 Safari/537.36

Steps to reproduce:

Can't select multiple folders in new folder tree:
Click on a folder, use Shift+Down-arrow to select multiple folders.

Actual results:

Only one folder selected.

Expected results:

Should select multiple folders.

Comment 2

[Geoff Lankow (:darktrojan)]

We have no intention of changing this.

Comment 3

[PS]

So how do you move/delete multiple folders? You're removing that functionality? Will the standard selection paradigm (explained in bug 1819572 comment 8) not apply to folders any more?

Comment 4

[PS]

Unlike for messages, currently you can't select multiple folders, neither with Shift+Click, Ctrl+Click nor Shift+Down/Up-Arrow. Is this by design?

Comment 5

[PS]

Messages show the standard selection behaviour now that bug 1819572 is fixed. Thanks for that! So is the same not desirable for folders?

Comment 6

[Alessandro Castellani [:aleca]]

I'm not sure we want to do this.
For sure, moving multiple folders at once will be annoying, but how often does a user need to organize multiple folders?

Messages are another thing, where multi selection actions are the norm, and we also offer a proper layout to handle multiselection.
For folders, if we allow selecting multiple folders we will need to create a new view to reflect that state in the message thread.

There are potentially a couple of "good" actions that might be triggered on multi folders, like opening then in separate tabs, or marking them as read all at once.

For now we're not planning to tackle this, but if we get many bug reports with valid workflows, we could consider it.

Comment 7

[PS]

I agree, selecting multiple folders is not a common requirement, but when you need it, it will be most surprising that is doesn't work since it's been available for the last 20 or so years in Netscape/Thunderbird and any OS.

One more common use case is deleting or moving multiple folders to the trash. Also after an import from another client, there will be the need to move/delete multiple folders.

Comment 8

[Axel Grude]

(In reply to Alessandro Castellani [:aleca] from comment #6)

I'm not sure we want to do this.
For sure, moving multiple folders at once will be annoying, but how often does a user need to organize multiple folders?

Probably not often, but sometimes users need to do fundamental reorganization, for instance when migrating or merging mail accounts. This is something where Thunderbird always had significant edge over web interfaces. So I am sad that this was decided to go to WONTFIX - is it really that hard to implement?

For now we're not planning to tackle this, but if we get many bug reports with valid workflows, we could consider it.

One thing about re-organizing folder locations - it is obviously very very difficult to do with just the folder pane alone - (both as a source and target, and even when just done with a single folder) but once you use a tool like QuickFolders or Nostalgy to select the target folder it becomes quite a simple operation. There may obviously also be a pitfall here - as moving in IMAP can take a long time especially if you go across account boundaries - this may not be obvious to casual users. However if you're aware that it may be time consuming, having to break up moving cherry picked folders to a new target into several lengthy operations will also add to the pain for the user - so I don't think "how often is it needed?" is a good counter argument to "how difficult are we making our user's work when we take it away when it is needed?".