928365 - Quickfilter bar: Implement three-way pref and (contextual) UI to allow auto-hiding and never hiding qfb (always show, disable ESC), in addition to current hide-by-ESC behaviour

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Thunderbird :: Mail Window Front End, enhancement)

Description

[Virgo Pärna]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:24.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/24.0 (Beta/Release)
Build ID: 20130910160258

Steps to reproduce:

When quick filter bar is active I pressed ESC key.


Actual results:

Quick filter bar disappears


Expected results:

Nothing should happen. I know, that it is made so on purpose, but I really wish, that there was a way to disable this behavior.  I find it highly illogical, considering, that I set this bar manually to be visible from View menu.

Comment 1

[rsx11m]

There is a keyboard shortcut for the Quick Filter Bar as well, Ctrl+Shift+K. I'm usually invoking and hiding it from the keyboard myself to not waste space when I don't need it, and as I need the keyboard anyway to type in what I'm searching for, using the keyboard shortcuts is actually quite beneficial.

Comment 2

[rsx11m]

(In reply to rsx11m from comment #1)
> There is a keyboard shortcut for the Quick Filter Bar as well ...
"for opening and focusing" I meant to add, in case that's not obvious.

Comment 3

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

I'd agree with reporter that notwithstanding potential benefit of hiding qfb on ESCape, it would also be beneficial to disable hide-on-ESC, and it is indeed ux-unusual for items checked in view menu to disappear so easily.

I'm an all-keyboard user like rsx11m, but I use qfb so constantly that I would nevertheless be one of those who never want it to go away, and in spite of knowing the behaviour/UI, I still get slightly irritated and annoyed when it's not there because I pressed ESC once too much (and I end up in the other global search box which might be good occasionally for finding the needle in the haystack, but it's also so cumbersome in workflows).

The UX issue here (even for administrators in business environments) is that many users will only use what they already find on screen, so if it's not there, it's like non-existent. On big screens, the vertical space used by qfb is not an issue, so allowing permanent qfb is possible.

I would support introducing a hidden pref for that, something like mail.quickfilterbar.hideOnEscape=true.
Setting that pref to false (for users who so wish) would also eliminate the need for that huge quickfilter button wasting space on the mail toolbar.
We could also easily and unintrusively expose that pref in an in-place context menu on qfb, similar to what we already have on the attachment header bar ("[ ] Initially show attachment pane"), something like:
"[ ] Always show Quick Filter Bar" or
"[x] Hide Quick Filter Bar with ESC"

Comment 4

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

Different users, different needs - we also have the opposite request:
xref bug 562694 - Allow quickfilter bar (Ctrl+Shift+K) to automatically hide again after search usage

Comment 5

[rsx11m]

Actually, that's mine. ;-) If we are going to provide a new preference, maybe all three variants (never hide, hide on keyboard shortcut, hide after use) can be covered in a single extension of this feature.

Comment 6

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

(In reply to rsx11m from comment #5)
> Actually, that's mine. ;-) If we are going to provide a new preference,
> maybe all three variants (never hide, hide on keyboard shortcut, hide after
> use) can be covered in a single extension of this feature.

+1. Awesome. That's the kind of creative user-oriented efficiency which we need for TB. :)

Can we work out a name and values for that pref, and unintrusive (contextual) UI?

Perhaps something like this?

mail.quickfilterbar.autohide=0|1|2
[Edited:]
0 = never hide (or could/should this be -1?)
1 = hide manually with ESC (default)
2 = auto-hide after every use

Comment 7

[rsx11m]

I'm fine with that. The disable (i.e., never hide) value should probably be either 0 or -1, it shouldn't be a problem to have the default set to 1 or 2 (whichever value "hide by ESC" would be in this case).

Comment 9

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

IMO would be simple (i.e. no new UI and pref needed) to do this by just making the already available quick filter "pin" not be affected by escape key

Comment 11

[Andreas Baumgartner]

The current behaviour is annoying from a UX point of view. In my opinion, the solution suggested in comment #6 would be perfect.

Comment 12

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

(In reply to Wayne Mery (:wsmwk) from comment #9)
> IMO would be simple (i.e. no new UI and pref needed) to do this by just
> making the already available quick filter "pin" not be affected by escape key

I think the "pin" has a different function namely to make the filter criteria stick cross-folder, which is different from filter bar visibility. Conflating that does not look like a good idea to me. Users may want the bar to hang around always, but that doesn't mean that they also want their filter criteria to stick cross-folder.

Comment 14

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

(In reply to Andreas Baumgartner from comment #11)

The current behaviour is annoying from a UX point of view. In my opinion,
the solution suggested in comment #6 would be perfect.

We shouldn't wait for more duplicates here.
We can start with implementing the pref per my comment 6 and do the UI later.

(In reply to Thomas D. (:thomas8) from comment #6)

mail.quickfilterbar.autohide=0|1|2
0 = never hide
1 = hide manually with ESC (default)
2 = auto-hide after every use

Comment 15

[Alessandro Castellani [:aleca]]

mail.quickfilterbar.autohide=0|1|2

This pref with its options seems reasonable to me.

2 = auto-hide after every use

How would this work?
Do we want to hide it after the user presses "Search" or Enter?
Or do we want to hide it once we detect a focusout event on the whole bar, in case the user wants to manage the various toggable filters?

Comment 16

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

I don't think we'd want an auto-hide pref at all.

Comment 17

[Alessandro Castellani [:aleca]]

We're drastically changing the UI for the next cycle, rebuilding the entire mail tab UI, so the quick filter bar will have a completely different usability paradigm.
Marking this as wontfix.

Comment 18

[Brett Zamir]

Cool, but I hope that means that the use of the escape key will not automatically lead to the quick filter disappearing.