GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 202638
hide the formatting toolbar in composer
Last modified: 2008-06-22 23:17:34 UTC
When I am composing messages with only plain text, there should be an option to hide the formatting toolbar in the composition windows. In fact, I think it should be the default state. The only buttons that work on the toolbar are the indent/exdent and text-type list (which, frankly is a complete mystery in the plaintext context, anyhow).
The list items work in plain text, because they render in the plain text output. The same is true for the indent functions.
Hi Larry, Okay, I understand that this is by design. However, I would still like the option to hide the formatting toolbar. I don't use it and am perfectly happy to format my document by typing in what I want. For one thing, if I format it, I know exactly what I'm getting and I don't have to fool around learning a formatting tool's quirks. Since I won't use it and, likely, many others will not use it either, why should our valuable screen real estate be consumed by unused GUI controls? I would like to see this bug report reduced in priority rather than marked as "NOT A BUG". Thanks, Miles
That is reasonable. Reducing to cosmetic.
*** Bug 304792 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 231520 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Created attachment 46651 [details] [review] small patch For my own enjoyment I have created the attached patch. It just hides the formatting toolbar when not in HTML mode. I realize that you then loose the paragraph alignment items then, but I fail to see the use of those in plain text anyway...
adding patch keyword
See how the message window looks without the formatting toolbar : http://www.gnome.org/~vnoel/screenshots/evo-new-message.png The patch gives you cute window messages :-)
if the patch could be extended to also include a menu item in the "view" menu, it would be rather cool...
Vincent: An option to hide/unhide the toolbar would be nice.
FWIW, the Paragryph Style dropdown is *highly* useful even when composing text/plain messages. Think of lines (maybe commands) that should not wrap. I use to need them all the time...
*** Bug 495459 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
You know, I didn't think I liked this idea at first. But looking at the screenshot in comment #8, I have to say it's growing on me. The window in the screenshot looks clean and simple. We could easily make paragraph style (and alignment) available through the context menu in plain-text mode. In fact, it should be anyway. I would also add a separator followed by a "Style Toolbar" toggle to the View menu. The question then becomes, how should it behave in HTML mode? Should we force it to be visible in HTML mode and desensitize the menu item? Or should we keep it orthogonal to HTML/text mode, potentially forcing the user to toggle /two/ things everytime he switches modes? A third option is to remember the visiblity for each mode. So we'd have two GConf keys -- "visible-in-html" and "visible-in-text" -- and toggling the View menu item would change the setting for the current mode. Or would that be too confusing? I'm leaning toward the third option myself. It sounds good on paper (er, Bugzilla) but I think I'd have to actually play with it to know whether it's intuitive enough.
Merging this discussion into bug #408707. There's a proposal there for improving the toolbars. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 408707 ***