Martin Meyer Reporter
	Description • 18 years ago

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.1) Gecko/20060601 Firefox/2.0 (Ubuntu-edgy)
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.1.1) Gecko/20061218 Thunderbird/2.0b1 ID:2006121804

Currently when I want to find a contact to send a message to I need to use my mouse to open the contact sidebar, then focus the search box. After that things go alright, but there are two steps that I really can't use my keyboard for.

Can we get a keyboard shortcut to activate the contact sidebar? And can we make the search box automatically focused when it becomes shown? Possibly a ctrl+l or ctrl+s or just / to focus in the search box when you're focused elsewhere on the sidebar? This would make the contacts sidebar much more usable.

Related but not duplicate of Bug 343973: Contacts sidebar should feature the same keybindings as the address book. That bug is specifically about keyboard shortcuts from within the sidebar, I'm more concerned with activating the sidebar in the first place.

Reproducible: Always

	Mike Cowperthwaite Assignee
	Comment 1 • 18 years ago

Once visible, the contacts bar is accessible, barely... Alt+R moves the focus to the From dropdown; follow this by Shift+Tab and the focus is now on the Add To CC button at the bottom, and additional Shift+Tab's move up the sidebar.  Much more work than switching to the mouse.

In the 3-pane window, F8 works to show/hide the message pane.  I think that using F-key shortcuts for show/hide of various UI components would be a great convention to settle on, but I imagine getting buy-off on such an idea would be a boatload of work.  Here, at least, maybe F8 or F9 would be a good shortcut for show/hide of the contacts bar.

I had made a patch a year or so ago for bug 303712 which re-implemented the Shift+Tab/F6 navigation scheme in the compose window to use F6 as a "change pane" that would take the Contacts Bar into account.  I'll look at making sure that still works and see if I can get it in to the trunk sometime soon.

	Mike Cowperthwaite Assignee
	Comment 2 • 18 years ago

This patch (non-CVS diff against the 3a1-1215 nightly) simply implements F9 to open the sidebar (same key as used in Seamonkey browser for opening the sidebar).  If a different key is desired, it'd be trivial to change the patch.

No string changes required, so this could conceivably make it into TB 2.0.

	Mike Cowperthwaite Assignee
	Comment 3 • 18 years ago

Another patch (non-CVS vs. 3a1-1215 nightly) to add access-key support to the contact panel.

Unfortunately, I'm getting odd behavior from this that I can't explain.  I'm finding that sometimes, if I use Alt-O to switch to the search field, and enter a search string, that when I tab to the list of search results I can't make a selection.  This may occur only after an address has already been added (?).  I don't know why any of these changes should cause that behavior.

There's also a problem where, using the button-accelerators to add an address, the focus shifts out of the sidebar to the address widget, so adding multiple addresses using the sidebar and keyboard still needs tightening up; but this behavior isn't new, it's just that it's obvious now that keyboarding access is simple.

	Mike Cowperthwaite Assignee
	Comment 4 • 18 years ago

Comment on attachment 249463 [details] [diff] [review]
Add access keys to contacts panel

(In reply to comment #3)
> Unfortunately, I'm getting odd behavior from this that I can't explain.  I'm
> finding that sometimes, if I use Alt-O to switch to the search field, and
> enter a search string, that when I tab to the list of search results I can't
> make a selection.  This may occur only after an address has already been
> added (?).  I don't know why any of these changes should cause that behavior.

My changes didn't cause that behavior; I've reproduced with an unpatched version.  Bug 364760.

	Mike Cowperthwaite Assignee
	Comment 5 • 18 years ago

(In reply to comment #3)
> There's also a problem where, using the button-accelerators to add an
> address, the focus shifts out of the sidebar to the address widget

Bug 364819.


Regarding the patch adding the access keys: I chose those keys from the ones left over from the compose window.  Should there be a comment for localizers and future enhancers in both DTD files indicating the cross-dependency?
(Maybe this is the reason there were no access keys in the sidebar in the first place.)

	Mike Cowperthwaite Assignee
	Comment 6 • 18 years ago

Scott, are you interested in either of these patches for TB 2?

	Scott MacGregor
	Comment 7 • 18 years ago

Comment on attachment 249459 [details] [diff] [review]
Add F9 hotkey to open/close contacts pane

cool. Sorry for the delay in the review Mike.

	Phil Ringnalda (:philor)
	Comment 8 • 17 years ago

mail/components/compose/content/messengercompose.xul 1.102
mail/components/addrbook/content/abContactsPanel.xul 1.12
mail/locales/en-US/chrome/messenger/addressbook/abContactsPanel.dtd 1.4

	Mike Cowperthwaite Assignee
	Comment 9 • 17 years ago

Verifying that these patches were checked in.  Attachment 249463 [details] [diff] is working correctly, even after the path for bug 226468.

Attachment 249463 [details] [diff] is checked in, but the F9 keystroke is not working with 
3a1p-1013, Win2K.  I suspect this is a regression, but I haven't been regularly looking at trunk builds for months, so I couldn't say when.
I've opened bug 399714 about this.