352766 - File/Save Message usability: don't select whole file name when clicking in file name field

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Thunderbird :: Mail Window Front End, enhancement)

Description

[Lucius Chiaraviglio]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.0.7) Gecko/20060909 Firefox/1.5.0.7
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.0.7) Gecko/20060909 Firefox/1.5.0.7

If you save messages as files and need to make minor edits to the file name, it would be easier if Thunderbird DIDN'T select the whole file name when you click in the file name field of the file save dialog box.  (Selecting the whole file name if you press Alt-N is fine.)


Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.  Start to save a message
2.  When the File Save dialog box is up, select something other than the file name
3.  Click in the file name field where you want to edit the file name (assuming you want to edit just a little bit of it and not retype the whole thing)

Actual Results:  
The whole name is selected.  You have to click again where you want to edit to get the text cursor there, but if you do this too fast, you trigger the standard double-click event, thus selecting a whole "word" in the file name, thus requiring another attempt to position the text cursor.  Alternatively, you can use arrow keys, but this is definitely more work if you want to get to somewhere in the middle of the file name.

Expected Results:  
Do not select the whole file name -- instead put the text cursor in the part of the file name where you clicked.

Comment 1

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

The File Save dialog is the Windows standard one, there is no special handling on Mozilla's part for that dialog as far as I know.  I see the same behavior in other Windows apps.

Comment 2

[Lucius Chiaraviglio]

Microsoft Outlook does not select the whole file name when you click in the file name.  (Say what you will about that program as a whole, but it does have some decent usability features.)

Comment 3

[Lucius Chiaraviglio]

P. S.  With regard to the behavior of other Windows programs:

Program               Selects whole file name?
--------------------  ------------------------
Microsoft Notepad XP  Yes
Microsoft Word 2003   No
Microsoft Excel 2003  No
Adobe Reader 7.0      Yes
Adobe Photoshop 6.0   No
Adobe Illustrator 10  Yes
Adobe ImageReady 3.0  No

So somehow this behavior is selectable, and more than one of the major software companies are not even consistent among their own programs.  I cannot say whether it is easy or hard to alter this choice in Thunderbird/Firefox (I see that Firefox does the same thing as Thunderbird).

Comment 4

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

I think we can't fix this because it probably ships with the native OS dialogue we're using (there are different types of such dialogues on same OS like Windows XP). And I doubt it's worth the time to try.

+1 for wontfix.

I think that makes it wontfix. Feel free to disagree.

Comment 5

[Lucius Chiaraviglio]

I guess whether it's worthwhile to try depends upon how mutually incompatible the different choices of dialog box are with each other.  Ideally this could at least be selected with about:config:{somethingorother} (and then go to the default one if the user types in an invalid value).  But I know nothing about what might be different (depending upon this choice) in what one has to pass to the function(s) that call the File dialog boxes.

Comment 6

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

(In reply to Lucius Chiaraviglio from comment #5)
That's appreciated. However, it is very hard to find coders who are able to solve problems in this corner of native OS file dialogues: There are other, more relevant problems around these dialogues that we've been unable to address.

For this bug, I'm not even sure if what you request would be accepted in terms of UX, because we'd certainly have other users complaining who prefer the current behaviour of "always select file name". Sure, such issues can be solved with a pref, but I'm not sure if this is important enough to add one.

Basically there haven't been any comments showing interest, nor votes, nor duplicates, so the general interest in this trivial RFE seems to be very low. With thousands of RFEs, keeping this open makes it harder to find other RFEs that are more relevant.

I suppose if you come up with a patch or some pointers to code how to change this, it could be reconsidered (requiring ui-review first), but as it stands, I'm afraid it's going nowhere.