551816 - Make Undo remove applied tags

Status: NEW

(Thunderbird :: Message Reader UI, enhancement)

Description

[Richard Mlynarik]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; en-US; rv:1.9.2) Gecko/20100115 Firefox/3.6
Build Identifier: 3.0.2 Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; en-US; rv:1.9.1.8) Gecko/20100216 Thunderbird/3.0.2

I never use the Firefox tags facility.
I only EVER encounter it my accident, when I press a numeric digit key by
mistake when reading mail.  (God why is changing keyboard shortcuts such
a monumental world-class pain in Mozilla programs?  Arrrrgghh!)

When I do accidentally do this, and end up with unwanted tags, I have trouble remembering how to get rid of them.  (The answer is to press the "0" key, but
that's far from obvious.)

Undo (Edit / Undo menu item, command-z keyboard shortcut, and a click-right
context menu) should undo setting tags.


Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Read mail in standard 3 pane mode.
2. Accidentally press the 1 key.
3. Unwanted and unexpected (and confusing, to me) tag appears on message.
4. How do I get rid of that thing?
Actual Results:  
Use Google to try to work out WTF happened and how to get rid of it.  (Press the "0" key -- who knew?)

Expected Results:  
Use undo.  Problem solved.

Comment 1

[Ludovic Hirlimann [:Usul]]

So you're bug is about the fact that removing tag is not obvious right ?

Comment 2

[Ludovic Hirlimann [:Usul]]

Daniel do we have another bug on that in bugzilla ?

Comment 3

[Daniel Kabs, reporting bugs since 2002]

Ludo, I searched for dupes about removing or undoing tags, but didn't find any.

Comment 4

[Ludovic Hirlimann [:Usul]]

(In reply to comment #3)
> Ludo, I searched for dupes about removing or undoing tags, but didn't find any.

Thanks for looking.

STR :

1) select a message
2) Press 1 to tag the message
3) Press ctrl/cmd - Z

Results : 
Nothing happens

Expected Results :
Tag is removed from the selected message.

Comment 5

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

Fwiw, I think the lack of UNDO for tagging can cause significant tag dataloss problems depending on the scenario. Like this:

STR1 (worst case)

1) Select loads (1000+) of messages, all of which are heavily tagged with a variety of different user-defined tag combinations.
2) Intend to use keyboard shortcut 9 to apply a user-defined tag like "cleanup", "needs-owner", "done" (you name it), but accidentally hit 0 (the key next to 9).
2a) Alternatively, just hit 0 accidentally while having loads of heavily tagged messages selected.

Actual result for STR1

* complex tagging data for loads of messages (1000+) are lost for good
* no way of UNDO accidental removal of all tags
Depending on scenarios, this could be massive tag dataloss which might severely affect users real-world workflows if these are based on tags.

Expected result for STR1:

- Immediate UNDO (Ctrl+Z) after wrong mass un-tagging will restore the previous (complex) tag state (this bug). Thereafter, user can mass-apply the correct tag or whichever command on the selection.


STR2 (another bad case)

1) Select many (100+) messages, of which some (10) are tagged "Important"
2) Intend to tag them "Work", but accidentally press number key 1 instead of 2.

Actual result for STR2

100 messages have accidentally been tagged "Important" instead of "Work", and there is no way to undo this correctly and restore the previous state:
- removing "Important" from all 100 messages will also remove it from those 10 messages which were *originally* tagged important => significant tag dataloss.
- no UNDO feature (Ctrl+Z) for tagging operations (this bug)

Expected result for STR2

- Immediate UNDO (Ctrl+Z) after wrong mass tagging will restore the previous tag state: 10 of 100 messages tagged "Important". Thereafter, user can mass-apply the correct tag, "Work", to achieve desired end result: 100 messages tagged "Work", of which 10 messages also tagged "Important".

Technically, this might be an RFE, but practically, it looks more like a bug by omission.

Comment 6

[[e-mail]]

I support the request for adding tagging and un-tagging to be supported by Undo.

I just had an accident similar to what is described in Thomas D.'s Comment 5.
I assumed that another window was in focus, and did CTRL-A to select all text there, then 0 to replace it with 0. However, focus was still in Thunderbird, and as a result, all E-mails in the active folder were selected, and all tags from years of tagging were removed. 

Undo did not make the tags reappear. So a lot of information is lost.