509359 - Vertical splitter between folderpane and threadpane should only look like it's 1px wide, but be wider for clicks

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Thunderbird :: Mail Window Front End, defect)

Description

[Phil Ringnalda (:philor)]

tl;dr description in bug 468004 comment 2. The short version is that 1px wide splitters on OS X aren't actually 1px wide, they have 2px of transparency on each side, so they have 5px that responds to clicks. In Tb2, we had a partial fake by having the splitter 3px wide and transparent, with -3px left margin, so it covered the 1px border and 2px inside the folder pane, acting like most of a native 1px splitter. Then bug 201499 added a stack around tree rows, which pulled them up into the layer with positioned elements and things with opacity, which are all on top of everything else, so now the folderpane tree is on top of the transparent 2px of splitter, and we're back down to 1px.

The other way we're non-native is when you drag the splitter far enough left to collapse the folderpane: native 1px splitters disappear when you collapse them, and you're supposed to have a button in the statusbar to reopen the collapsed pane. That's pretty sucky behavior, so native apps tend to hack around in various ways like sticking a grippy onto the bottom of the splitter, or only collapsing down to a 1px panel. Not sure if it landed yet, but a cute solution I saw mentioned in a SeaMonkey bug was to have the collapsed splitter look more like a fat native splitter (like our splitter between the threadpane and message pane in the vertical layout), so open and dragging it looks like 1px, but collapsed it's wide enough to see and grab.

Comment 1

[Jim Porter (:squib)]

As far as I can tell, this is already the case. The splitter's hit area is actually 5px wide. If you still see the problem, feel free to reopen this.

Comment 2

[Phil Ringnalda (:philor)]

Nope, whoever made the splitter 1px on Windows (and perhaps Linux, dunno) did the right thing there, made a wider target than the visible splitter, but not on OS X.

Comment 3

[Richard Marti (:Paenglab)]

I can look into it.

Comment 4

[Richard Marti (:Paenglab)]

Attachment: bug509359.patch

This patch implements the Linux/Windows logic for OS X. I also removed the -moz-local-dir selectors because bug 621351 is fixed and use the new -inline- attributes to remove the -moz prefix.

I'm also using the hover style for the collapsed splitters in chat tab to show the user where the splitter is to expand.

Comment 5

[aleth [:aleth]]

Comment on attachment 8675406 [details] [diff] [review]
bug509359.patch

Review of attachment 8675406 [details] [diff] [review]:
-----------------------------------------------------------------

Works well!

I'm not sure if you missed the splitter between a chat conversation and the chat input box or not.

Comment 6

[Richard Marti (:Paenglab)]

(In reply to aleth [:aleth] from comment #5)
> Comment on attachment 8675406 [details] [diff] [review]
> bug509359.patch
> 
> I'm not sure if you missed the splitter between a chat conversation and the
> chat input box or not.

I only made changes on the vertical splitters (the :not([orient="vertical"]). Or to be more clear, the splitters which are going from top to bottom. ;)

Comment 7

[aleth [:aleth]]

https://hg.mozilla.org/comm-central/rev/5c1bc9144b1fa10837fc034d11be60df1092ef7e
Bug 509359 - Make the splitter grab area also on OS X wider. r=aleth a=aleth