380262 - RFE: Add keyboard navigation to switch folder views (All, Unread, Recent, Favorite)

Status: NEW

(Thunderbird :: Mail Window Front End, enhancement)

Description

[Peter Tandler]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.3) Gecko/20070309 Firefox/2.0.0.3
Build Identifier: version 2.0.0.0 (20070326)

I miss an efficient way to navigate through the folder views using the keyboard.
I often switch among those very nice views, but using the mouse and cycle through take too much time.
What would work would be to replace the arrows with a popup menu (similar to the "views" menu, see also related Bug 336421), and add a keyboard shortcut to open this menu. This solution might be more extensible than assigning something like "Alt-1" for All View.

I would prefer this compared with the alternative to add something like "Alt-PageDown" to go to the next view, as I then would still have to cycle.

Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Or, perhaps a broader idea can be developed?  (not sure what that is)

Comment 2

[Kent James (:rkent)]

I also dislike the cycling. In fact, I normally run with a little extension that I wrote that shows individual icons for each of the four standard views. Perhaps the scope of this  bug could be expanded to add individual icons with keyboard shortcuts?

Thinking long-term, as we expand the capability of virtual folders, someone could end up with large numbers of virtual folders to manage. So I can imagine having different "views" for folder lists. Any assignment of keys for folder views should keep in mind that it might need expanding to additional views.

Comment 3

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

(In reply to comment #2)
> I also dislike the cycling. In fact, I normally run with a little extension
> that I wrote that shows individual icons for each of the four standard views.

that sounds peachy

Comment 4

[Kent James (:rkent)]

I'm surprised this bug hasn't gotten more traction. Now with Smart Folders added, I really, really dislike the cycling. I'm not sure where my extension went though, I think I did not update it after jminta's conversion of the folder pane to js.

I've been thinking of redoing it, but instead of icons, using a dropdown list as proposed in comment 0. I think that the selection of which folders to display is an important issue for people with lots of folders, and I can imagine a lot more than 5 choices at some point, so we need something that scales.