258371 - Advanced "Search Messages" results should have a message preview pane

Status: NEW

(Thunderbird :: Search, enhancement)

Description

[Avi Drissman]

I'm migrating from Eudora. One great feature of its searching ability is that
the resulting found emails are displayed in a two-pane window. You get a list of
matching results at the top, and then you can click them to show them in the
pane below.

Searching with Thunderbird is much more painful. First, you can't keep working
while it's searching; you have to wait until it's done (filed as bug 258370).
But a more annoying problem is that there is no preview pane.

If my search is a bit vague, it'll return quite a few results. If I need to peek
into the results to find the one that I need, I have to open one, then close it,
then open the next, then close it, etc. In contrast, in Eudora I could just
click on the individual results in the top pane and just look at the bottom pane.

I think this is a good feature to have.

Using Thunderbird version 0.7.3 (20040803).

Comment 1

[David :Bienvenu]

the new virtual folder work has actually made this quite possible. It probably
just requires a little xul hacking at this point, since I made the search view
capable of loading messages.

Comment 2

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

david, is there a blocking bug number? I thought I saw recent activity on #bugs 
bug os such, but don't recall the number.  (This would be a GREAT feature 
addition)

Comment 3

[David :Bienvenu]

no, no blocking bug, since I've done the backend work that would have blocked this.

Comment 4

[David :Bienvenu]

I tried Eudora 7.0 for Windows and I didn't see a preview pane for search results.  Am I missing something?

I was looking at Eudora because I was looking for ideas about how to hide and show the preview pane. In any case, to implement this, you want to look at the 3 pane ui, and how it has a message pane - for tb, this would be in messenger.xul. I'll have a quick whack at this to see if this approach is going to work, and if it does, I'll try to get you started.

Comment 5

[David :Bienvenu]

Attachment: proof of concept

it's really just this easy. There's more work to do, obviously - get hide/show of message pane to work; add contentAreaClick method so context menu works in message pane, add a context menu to the search thread pane so users can reply/forward, etc...but this is all it takes to get a preview pane up and limping.

Comment 6

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

maybe even adapt a tabbed interface?  bug 297379

Comment 7

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

Tabbed or not, I think adding a preview to the results window would be a huge improvement at a rather low cost that would make advanced search greatly more useful. You can't really expect people to create a saved search each time they want to preview their advanced search results (as is the usual advice in the forums). And finding what you are actually looking for in search results without preview might be rather painful...

This feature has been asked for several times in the user forums:
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=30&t=897405&start=0&st=0&sk=t&sd=a
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=30&t=653033&p=3359175&hilit=preview+search+preview#p3359175
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=30&t=465256&p=2494938&hilit=preview+search+preview#p2494938

Comment 8

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

David Bienvenu, are you still willing to continue working on this feature?
Otherwise, Assigned-To might need to be updated.

Comment 9

[David :Bienvenu]

assigning to nobody - with the new gloda + exp toolbar work, I think this bug becomes a lot less relevant.

Comment 10

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

Looking at the proof of concept patch attachment 206438 [details] [diff] [review], this should be relatively simple to implement, while greatly improving the usefulness of "Search messages".

(In reply to comment #9)
> assigning to nobody - with the new gloda + exp toolbar work, I think this bug
> becomes a lot less relevant.

Absolutely not. "Search Messages" dialogue (Ctrl+Shift+F) is the only high-precision search with multiple search criteria that we offer.
I agree with Wayne's comment #2 and comment #6:

> This would be a GREAT feature addition
> maybe even adapt a tabbed interface?
(although Wayne seems to have changed his mind on making this search tabbed, see related bug 516229, comment #4).

Tabbed or not, "Search messages" is pretty useless without a preview, and the current use patterns are way too clumsy because of this.
If we add the preview, the dialogue effectively covers the whole screen, so we can just as well put it into a tab.

The use pattern I imagine is this:

Ctrl+Shift+F from anywhere will open a new tab with a slightly redesigned version of the current search dialogue, with added preview (this bug).

From the result list of messages:
- click on a result msg will show the msg in preview below (much the same as we do in thread pane view ("open as list" from gloda search results), which is basically the same use case (a search result list))
- double-click will open the msg in a new tab
- ctrl+double-click will open the msg in new tab in the background, with focus remaining on the results list (similar to FF). So you can ctrl+double click on several result messages and they'll all open up nicely on subsequent tabs for later processing.

Comment 11

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

(In reply to comment #10)
> - ctrl+double-click will open the msg in new tab in the background, with focus
> remaining on the results list (similar to FF). So you can ctrl+double click on
> several result messages and they'll all open up nicely on subsequent tabs for
> later processing.

Where we'd have to fine-tune the behaviour to avoid conflicts with ctrl-single-clicking for msg selection:
- ctrl+single click: select/deselect msg
- ctrl+double click: open msg in background tab (not sure what do with selection, but the current behaviour on ctrl+double click isn't very good either).

Comment 12

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

(In reply to comment #10)
> > This would be a GREAT feature addition
> > maybe even adapt a tabbed interface?
> (although Wayne seems to have changed his mind on making this search tabbed,
> see related bug 516229, comment #4).

I am actually open to the possibility. However, how it is received depends on how well it works - being forced into a solution that doesn't work as well as it does today doesn't sit well. Bear in mind also I was 3 years younger on the initial comment :) 


> Tabbed or not, "Search messages" is pretty useless without a preview,

not useless, but it would be FAR more user friendly. And, it would mitigate the issues you state in comment 11.

Comment 14

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

For the attention of our power coders:

Has proof of concept draft patch... Some quotes:

David :Bienvenu, comment 5, on the patch: 
> it's really just this easy

Wayne :wsmwk,  comment 2:
> This would be a GREAT feature addition...

Thomas D., comment 10:
> "Search Messages" dialogue (Ctrl+Shift+F) is the *only* high-precision search
> that we offer, with multiple search criteria, OR-searches and negation...

(In reply to David :Bienvenu from comment #5)
> Created attachment 206438 [details] [diff] [review]
> proof of concept
> 
> it's really just this easy. There's more work to do, obviously - get
> hide/show of message pane to work; add contentAreaClick method so context
> menu works in message pane, add a context menu to the search thread pane so
> users can reply/forward, etc...but this is all it takes to get a preview
> pane up and limping.

Comment 15

[Filipus Klutiero]

(In reply to Thomas D. (currently busy elsewhere; needinfo?me) from comment #7)
> Tabbed or not, I think adding a preview to the results window would be a
> huge improvement at a rather low cost that would make advanced search
> greatly more useful. You can't really expect people to create a saved search
> each time they want to preview their advanced search results (as is the
> usual advice in the forums). And finding what you are actually looking for
> in search results without preview might be rather painful...

I very much second the above as well as comment 10.

I doubt we need to keep the current quick search + faceted search + advanced search trio, but if advanced search is kept, this request would help a lot. One has to be able to exclude messages from a list (with a "doesn't contain" operator) without losing the preview pane nor resorting to a Saved search.

Comment 16

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

A thought - if advanced search could be made to put its results in a tab**, then not only would you have message preview, but you'd also have the possibility for filtering the search results

** Which you can do today for searches that are saved or turned into custom views. But of course then these are not ad hoc searches.

Comment 17

[Filipus Klutiero]

Ticket 1135116 requests to "Present Search Results as a Message List or Virtual Folder", which would achieve the benefit requested here.

Comment 18

[Richard Leger]

In Bug 1102861 (Integrate 'Search Message...' window into the main UI + Add button for quick toggling between folder view and search view + Extend features) I made a proposal with picture mockup how the advanced search feature could be better integrated into the main UI. Instead of a new tab (so this feature could be added as well), the search criteria and result shall appears in the main UI and be browsable the same way the Inbox is browsed (with preview and quick filter search).

Contrary to Filipus, I believe the "quick search + faceted search + advanced search trio" shall be kept. Indeed all our end-users do use the three different way to search for information (quick search in all mailboxes, quick filtering of current folder and advanced search).

Another possibility, to keep the idea of reducing the number of feature, could be that the quick search in all mailboxes (not to mistake with the quick filter of current folder), opens the advance search with the contains criteria preset and the results instead of the current web page search result window. Hope that make sense. But that would be relevant only if the search result appears in the main UI (or as a new tab as a list of messages allowing further quick filter of result and preview of msg...

Comment 19

[Filipus Klutiero]

(In reply to Richard Leger from comment #18)
> Indeed all our end-users do use the three
> different way to search for information (quick search in all mailboxes,
> quick filtering of current folder and advanced search).

Thunderbird has been my primary or secondary MUA for the best part of the last decade, and I could count on my hands the number of times where I used quick search (probably mostly to test it). Though that is basically because search is so complicated that I keep forgetting this type of search exists. And because I can search all folders using [Gmail]/All Mail (except for the trash).

Comment 21

[wbarth10]

I am kind of surprised that this issue has not been addressed for more than 15 years. I wanted to move to Thunderbird as my primary E-Mail Software, but the awkward advanced search made me stay with TheBat, who has e terrible slow search but they got it done to have the preview pane within the search window. There is enough place for a message preview pane within the advanced search window.
Even when I move with "F" and "B" in a new window through the e-mails, I still have to switch often to the search window in order to see the list of e-mails.