400596 - finding a newsgroup is tedious

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Thunderbird :: Folder and Message Lists, enhancement)

Description

[a_geek]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en; rv:1.8.1.8) Gecko/20071008 Firefox/2.0.0.8
Build Identifier: version 2.0.0.6 (20070728)

I've subscribed to a lot of newsgroups on different news servers, but navigating to one of them is tedious. That's because the only way to do it seems to be to go to the folder pane, unfold a news server account, then scroll until you find it (resizing the folder pane appropriately because you usually don't want it that big when actually reading news), and then selecting the group.

I'd like to have the following features in the folder pane:

 * find-as-you-type for newsgroups names and possibly their descriptions
 * (added bonus) display of the complete newsgroups entry, not only the name as shown in the active file, and the ability to search that, too.
 * (added bonus #2) automatic, intermediate resizing of the folder pane to accommodate the names of the newsgroups, popping back to the original size once you select a group for reading

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.
2.
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Comment 1

[a_geek]

forgot to mention that this problem is/may be somewhat related to the following other bugs:

#86845, #400586

Comment 2

[zug_treno]

(In reply to comment #0)
>  * find-as-you-type for newsgroups names and possibly their descriptions

Duplicate of bug 281715?

Comment 3

[Gary Kwong [:gkw] [:nth10sd] (NOT official MoCo now)]

UI improvement? -> Bryan

Comment 4

[Bryan Clark (DevTools PM) [:clarkbw]]

I'm not sure the Folder Pane is the best place to put this.  Perhaps taking over the newsgroup HTML account overview page and making this happen there.  Also note that bug 446306 is developing the new folder pane