502515 - Keyboard shortcut to switch between message and header panes

Status: NEW

(Thunderbird :: Message Reader UI, enhancement)

Description

[James Teh [:Jamie]]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2a1pre) Gecko/20090702 Minefield/3.6a1pre
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1.1pre) Gecko/20090705 Shredder/3.0b3pre

In the message reader window (either standalone or integrated message pane), one can tab or shift+tab between the pane containing the message body and the pane containing the message headers. Tab and shift+tab move between individual focusable elements in these panes (as they should). However, this makes it very difficult to, for example, get to the message headers pane when there are a lot of links in the message body. It would be nice to have a keyboard shortcut to switch between the message body pane and the message headers pane.

F6/shift+f6 seems like a logical choice to me. This presents no problems for the standalone message reader window, but it may annoy users of the integrated message pane, as it adds another stop in the f6/shift+f6 order, which may make it more tedious to return to the folder list/message list panes.

Another option would be to add a keyboard shortcut to access the "From" header, which I think is always the first header. This way, the headers are easily accessed and the message is only a shift+tab away.

Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[James Teh [:Jamie]]

Bug 157108 seems to suggest that SeaMonkey once had such a feature, but that it has since been removed or broken. However, despite some vague references in that bug, I can't work out whether Thunderbird ever had this feature.

Comment 2

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

CC'ing some UI / accessibility gurus..

Comment 3

[Marco Zehe (:MarcoZ)]

I agree with Jamie that it would be cool to have the message body and first header respectively focusable by a single keystroke. And intuitively, I'd say F6 is the right choice in either case.

BTW: Jamie is one of the core developers of the free and open source NVDA screen reader on Windows.

Comment 4

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

Sounds like a good student-project too.

Comment 5

[Antonious]

okay can i have some contributor that can help me with the project

Comment 6

[Shriram (irc: Mavericks)]

(In reply to comment #5)
> okay can i have some contributor that can help me with the project
yea sure. let me know when and how long we plan to work on this project.

Comment 7

[Antonious]

Thanx sam i plan to work with my team for another week or so, we are a team of two memebers, we are CS students at the german university in cairo and this is a mini-project.

Comment 8

[Marcel Guzman]

Just attempted to repro this bug.

Unless I'm misunderstanding things, the F6/Shift+F6 combo works for switching between the message and header panes. Tested in Shredder 3.2a1pre and the release version of Thunderbird 3. So it seems like it's been fixed :)

Comment 9

[Lim Yuen Hoe]

I am able to shift+f6 to switch to the header from the message on my Shredder build, but neither f6 nor shift+f6 works for vice versa. Admittedly my build is probably about a month old, but definitely ahead of the release.

Comment 10

[Lim Yuen Hoe]

(In reply to comment #9)
> I am able to shift+f6 to switch to the header from the message on my Shredder
> build, but neither f6 nor shift+f6 works for vice versa. Admittedly my build is
> probably about a month old, but definitely ahead of the release.

Scratch that, nothing works in a standalone message reader window.

Comment 11

[Shriram (irc: Mavericks)]

(In reply to Lim Yuen Hoe from comment #10)
> (In reply to comment #9)
> > I am able to shift+f6 to switch to the header from the message on my Shredder
> > build, but neither f6 nor shift+f6 works for vice versa. Admittedly my build is
> > probably about a month old, but definitely ahead of the release.
> 
> Scratch that, nothing works in a standalone message reader window.

How about 7.01?