1922924 - A pinned Quick Filter bar should not disappear when pressing ESC

Status: REOPENED

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

Description

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/129.0.0.0 Safari/537.36

Steps to reproduce:

I understand from several bugs (bug 460414, bug 543365, bug 1091567) that ESC is an accepted and expected way to close the Quick Filter Bar. But I want to argue that the behavior should be different when the bar is pinned. Pinning in a GUI carries the connotation of permanence - something that you've intentionally bolted into place because it would otherwise go away after an event (moving the mouse away, a certain amount of time passing, items aging out of a list, etc.)

When the QFB is pinned, ESC should be ignored. The user has signaled their desire to keep the bar there, even if they're pressing ESC in other contexts (e.g. closing popup mail windows). But instead, pressing ESC actually "unpins" the QFB. That goes against expectations. The unpinning mechanism ought to correspond to the pinning mechanism.

Actual results:

(As described above) QFB becomes unpinned when pressing ESC. Another press of ESC causes it to disappear as usual.

Expected results:

(As described above) The QFB should not become unpinned when ESC is pressed, since the user almost certainly wants it to remain pinned. Clicking the same icon that pinned the QFB in the first place should be the one and only way to unpin it.

Comment 1

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

(In reply to David White from comment #0)

(As described above) The QFB should not become unpinned when ESC is pressed, since the user almost certainly wants it to remain pinned. Clicking the same icon that pinned the QFB in the first place should be the one and only way to unpin it.

However, bug 525716 does not match your premise.

Comment 2

[David White]

@Wayne, what I'm describing is distinct from bug 525716. I have no problem with a single push of ESC causing the Quick Filter criteria to be cleared out and messages to be un-filtered. I'm even OK with a second push of ESC hiding the Quick Filter bar if it has not been pinned.

But I am arguing that presses of ESC should NOT hide the Quick Filter bar if the user has pinned it in place. I can't think of any other desktop application where ESC is to unpin some GUI element that has been pinned; I don't think it should have that function in Thunderbird either.

Comment 3

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Does seem to be a valid question - should pinning prevent hiding a pinned QFB ?

Comment 5

[Stephan Sokolow]

I do NOT consider 1947722 a duplicate of this. I want my quick filter bar to stick around WITHOUT me having to manually unset my filters every time I change folders.

(Am I going to have to start experimenting with using LDTP as an AutoHotKey analogue so I can leave "pinned" set but fake-delete its current functionality by having a background process which watches the accessibility interfaces and manually clears the filters when the current folder changes?)

Comment 6

[Stephan Sokolow]

Attachment: Workaround for the now-duped bug 1947722

I decided to just solve the problem I actually wanted to solve, since I had some leftover code from when I needed to block Firefox from seeing Ctrl+Q. Here's a script which watches the active window on any X11 desktop and, when the class is Thunderbird and the role is 3pane, it XGrabKey's Escape and drops any received keypresses on the floor.

(This is one of the reasons I'm in no hurry to switch to Wayland.)

Comment 7

[Alessandro Castellani [:aleca] - PTO until Nov 16]

Thanks for the report and the suggestion.
Indeed, this can be confusing for users as a pinned element is expected to remain static and not be dismissable (similarly to a pinned Firefox tab).

There's a deeper problem here as the pin is used for persisting filters across folders, but that's not intuitive and also an incorrect visual and UX solution.
Also, changing this behaviour will modify an expected outcome that has been around for 10+ years, so most likely not every user will be happy and some will consider it a mistake.

This whole filters area will be rethought down the line, probably next year, so I'll keep this bug open so we can tackle it later on.

Comment 8

[David White]

some will consider it a mistake.

I would hope that would be a pretty small number. There are probably a lot of people (like me) who press ESC to tell Thunderbird "stop filtering my messages and show me everything." That's a great use of "Escape". I suspect there are far fewer users who stab ESC repeatedly because they're trying to get rid of a rather small toolbar they had pinned into place.

Thanks for considering it.