272915 - find as you type for sorted column

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Thunderbird :: Mail Window Front End, enhancement)

Description

[murali dharan]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0; Thunder Bird: version 0.9 (20041103)

After sorting the mails on say, the Sender column, the cursor must navigate
smartly to the typed in letters. Say I have the mails with the Senders:

Sender 
Albert
Beamer
Casey
Collins
Copeland
Danny
Ffarquar

After the Sender field sorting is turned on by clicking on Sender button,
Pressing C after should move the cursor to Casey; soon after pressing O should
move it to Collins; soon after pressing P should move it to Copeland. Etc.

Such navigation should be allowed on all the columns.



Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1.
2.
3.

Comment 1

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

This is an automated message, with ID "auto-resolve01".

This bug has had no comments for a long time. Statistically, we have found that
bug reports that have not been confirmed by a second user after three months are
highly unlikely to be the source of a fix to the code.

While your input is very important to us, our resources are limited and so we
are asking for your help in focussing our efforts. If you can still reproduce
this problem in the latest version of the product (see below for how to obtain a
copy) or, for feature requests, if it's not present in the latest version and
you still believe we should implement it, please visit the URL of this bug
(given at the top of this mail) and add a comment to that effect, giving more
reproduction information if you have it.

If it is not a problem any longer, you need take no action. If this bug is not
changed in any way in the next two weeks, it will be automatically resolved.
Thank you for your help in this matter.

The latest beta releases can be obtained from:
Firefox:     http://www.mozilla.org/projects/firefox/
Thunderbird: http://www.mozilla.org/products/thunderbird/releases/1.5beta1.html
Seamonkey:   http://www.mozilla.org/projects/seamonkey/

Comment 2

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

This bug has been automatically resolved after a period of inactivity (see above
comment). If anyone thinks this is incorrect, they should feel free to reopen it.

Comment 3

[murali dharan]

im still interested in this

Comment 5

[[:Aureliano Buendía]]

Ask to driver if this should be wontfix.

Comment 6

[adam]

As per 378772, I would like this functionality too. QuickFind is a completely different thing. Nearly all cell/mobile phone clients have this functionality now, it's about time it migrated to the desktop.

adam

Comment 7

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

Fact 1: TB breaks basic UI interaction patterns (at least on Windows), where pressing single letters in sorted lists of elements will always take you to the first element that starts with that letter (which is pretty comfortable e.g. for navigating folders, as requested in bug 387423).

Fact 2: TB has several one-letter shortcuts that users have come to appreciate over time, like m -> mark read/unread, or j->Junk (shift+j to unjunk), and F, N, T, B, P, ], [ for message navigation. See http://www.mozilla.org/support/thunderbird/keyboard. We would have to disable all of these conflicting shortcuts to implement this bug.

I hate to say so (as a matter of principle, Fact 1), but I think Fact 2 will ultimately win due to its historical weight and make this a wontfix candidate. Given other filtering options and the volatile nature of messages, having this in the message list is arguably less useful than in the folders list (bug 387423, which should not be prejudiced in case this one is wontfixed).

The problem I see with the current single-letter-shortcuts behaviour is that we are not giving users a choice to re-enable system default behaviour for sorted lists (single letter go-to navigation), but we should (well, and there's Bug 57805...).

Comment 9

[Jim Porter (:squib)]

WONTFIXing based on comment 7; this might get fixed one day if we totally redid our keyboard shortcuts, but that will probably be a while...