User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20041008 Firefox/0.10 Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20041008 Firefox/0.10 With regard to the great new "Grouped by Sort" feature in Thunderbird, I'd like to see a couple of improvements made. First being that the Grouped by Sort option should be persistent even when you change sort order or fields. To turn the feature off, you'd have to go to the view menu and uncheck the option. Actually, I'd like to see this behavior for threading as well, but I believe there's a separate bug for that. The second option I'd like to see would be to have a right click context menu added to the column headers, in which you could select "Group by this field", ala MS Outlook. We could probably find some other good sorting/viewing options to put here too, as right now you get the same context menu as you do when you right click a message, but with all options disabled. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. 2. 3.

Update summary

there's already a hidden pref that produces the behaviour you want for not turning off threading when clicking on a column - we could respect the same pref for not turning off grouping, except that there are some columns that we don't currently group by, e.g., the "read" column, the "flagged" column, and a few others, so those would have to be a special case.

David, I think that would be a fine solution. What is the pref, and is there a reason it's not currently exposed in the UI?

"mailnews.thread_pane_column_unthreads" there's a bug open to add this to the UI, I believe. I'll try to make the grouping stuff respect that pref as well...

Generally we should diff between sort criteria/direction and sort mode. These are two completely different features which should be separated more visually. When we are using a sort mode clicking on the column headers shouldn't reset the sort mode to unthreaded. Instead the selected sort mode should be consistent until the user decided to switch it off. This would also reflect threaded sort mode. Currently we aren't consistent because my described behaviour is already implemented under 'view | sort by'! We don't need a hidden pref or a new UI for that when we stay at the current sort mode. David, should I file a new bug for that? Tommy, please create new reports for every bug or RFE and don't mix them within one report.

The best would be to make separate "group by" and "sort by" menus, so that mails could be, say, group mails by date ascending and sort mails within groups by name descending.

Depending on bug 263349 which covers "First being that the Grouped by Sort option should be persistent even when you change sort order or fields." I would vote for a Mode drop list inbetween view and search in the UI.

Tommy Becker, you should open a separate bug for the part of your bug about context menus on the headers -- that's a good idea, and will get lost here if a fix is provided for the group/thread/criterion interactions. Regarding the first part of comment 0 (the current substance of this bug): (In reply to comment #4) > "mailnews.thread_pane_column_unthreads" Bug 219787. > there's a bug open to add this to the UI, I believe. There's also a very sensible request to make the value of that pref FALSE by default. > I'll try to make the grouping stuff respect that pref as well... Even if the pref mentioned is TRUE (default), selecting a different criterion thru the menu (e.g. Subject instead of Date) does not turn off threading; the "unthreading" behavior only occurs with the default value of the pref and clicking on a column header. However, the menu *does* undo Grouping, just as (regardless of the pref value) the column header does. And, when Grouping is undone like this, the mode switches (unwelcomely) to Threaded instead of Unthreaded. Another problem with this: if the pref is FALSE, and grouping is not turned on, clicking the Thread column toggles between threaded and unthreaded, without changing the sort criterion. However, if you click the thread column to exit from Grouped mode, it *does* reset the criterion, to Order Received. This is doubly annoying because you can't re-enter Group mode when sorting by Order Received. (I see that the thread column header isn't even displayed in Mozilla 1.8a6-1130 when grouping is on... this is getting really confusing.) I'm wondering if it would make sense for the Thread column header to advance modes from Unthreaded to Threaded to Grouped, since these are mutually exclusive. But that would require some sort of different handling for the case of unthreading=true. Having G as a shortcut to *enter* grouped mode (TB-only) but having to go to the menu to turn it off is not a particularly smooth UI. (In reply to comment #6) > The best would be to make separate "group by" and "sort by" menus I disagree; the UI is complex enough as it is. Bug 57898 (multi-criterion sorting) has been opened and languishing for years for the lack of a clean UI to handle this sorts of specification. (In reply to comment #7) > I would vote for a Mode drop list inbetween view and search in the UI. Which modes are you referring to? Grouped, Threaded and Unthreaded? I wouldn't like that at all -- viz. my comment above about using the Thread column header to switch between those three.

(In reply to comment #8) > > Having G as a shortcut to *enter* grouped mode (TB-only) but having to go to the > menu to turn it off is not a particularly smooth UI. This was already mentioned by me in bug 263919 .

(In reply to comment #8) > Tommy Becker, you should open a separate bug for the part of your bug about > context menus on the headers -- that's a good idea, and will get lost here if > a fix is provided for the group/thread/criterion interactions. This has been opened as bug 274934.

(In reply to comment #9) > (In reply to comment #8) > > > > Having G as a shortcut to *enter* grouped mode (TB-only) but having to go > > to the menu to turn it off is not a particularly smooth UI. > > This was already mentioned by me in bug 263919 . Bug 275871 has been opened to remove the shortcut.

*** Bug 309010 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Mode switching can also be improved by adding shortcut keys to threaded and unthreaded view. This is done with add-on ThreadKey: https://addons.mozilla.org/thunderbird/addon/2299/

http://gsfn.us/t/1m0de grouped by sort shortcut not Working in TB 3.1.4