874017 - Add a show/Hide folder pane button and keyboard shortcut

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Thunderbird :: Folder and Message Lists, enhancement)

Description

[bugsnmd]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:21.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/21.0 (Beta/Release)
Build ID: 20130512194354



Actual results:

There is currently no obvious way to turn the folder pane on and off. This means it is often taking up space, which in the vertical view means reading messages and the message list have limited space.


Expected results:

with a keyboard shortcut and a button to show/hide this, users could have more screen space for reading mail when they are not actively changing between folders

Comment 1

[leonardo]

I waited several release before looking into bugzilla and noticing this bug report. In my experience i found the lack of a shortcut for hiding/showing the folder pane annoying especially when using TB on a 13 inch screen or more little. Is this a modification that could be easily implemented?

Comment 2

[Kevin Ernst]

F9's not used for anything else to my knowledge, and given that F8 already shows/hides the message pane, my vote is for F9. I think this tracks with the "toggle sidebar" function in other software, although I can't put my finger on an example off-hand.

I was kind of surprised it wasn't already bound to F9, which is why I always head to the keyboard prefpane in macOS to do that. Unfortunately, on other platforms, you'd have to resort to AutoHotkey, AutoKey, or similar, and it's a bit of a pain.

I understand that dealing with all the complexities of shortcut keys on the various platforms must be a hard problem indeed, because I've watched history unfold with Firefox, from the Keyconfig XUL extension up to the limited support for setting shortcuts afforded to WebExtensions. A general-purpose solution for changing arbitrary application shortcuts similar to what LibreOffice or Word have seems very far off.

But it'd be nice to have just this one. :)

Comment 4

[dreadnaut]

Feeling the need for this shortcut, I had a look around the source code in comm-central but I couldn't find where keyboard shortcuts are defined. Maybe they are elsewhere, somewhere near localisation files?

To ease the suffering, I've create an add-on to test F9 as a possible shortcut. I quite like where it sits 👍
https://addons.thunderbird.net/thunderbird/addon/f9-hides-the-folder-pane/

Comment 5

[dreadnaut]

The add-on I've created to test F9 as the Folder Pane shortcut has passed 100 users — no advertising, just by being available on addons.thunderbird.net.

A similar add-on exists, which instead offers a button, so those using mine are definitely after the keyboard shortcut. I'd say they count as 100 upvotes for this feature! 😀

Comment 6

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/addon/folder-pane-toggler/ provides a button