GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 303653
Make headers collapsable in preview pane
Last modified: 2012-11-06 17:43:26 UTC
As of now, the mail headers ( including subject, To, CC ) are a part of the mail as per the GUI. What i mean is, if i scroll down to read a lengthy mail, the headers also scroll and thus are not visible. It would be very useful if the headers are 'fixed' in a position and scrolling only affects the actual mail message. Thunderbird does it that way. Also, adding a collapse button '+' and '-' to show/hide the headers is also a useful feature.
at least the last part of this is a duplicate. moving to mailer to sdestroy the UI component.
This is a question for ui. imo the behaviour is better as it is because it lets you see more message at once
I second notzed's thought. At the most a +/- to hide/show header is fine.
will not be fixed in the 2.5 timeframe, retargetting to "future".
Bumping version to a stable release.
Created attachment 184110 [details] [review] Adds +/- button for collapsing headers in email preview Hi all, this patch adds +/- button to the headers field in email preview. When the headers are collapsed, a single row with bold subject and sender's address is displayed. Collapse state is remembered, so once you collapse headers in a one mail, they will be collapsed in all other mails until you expand them again or restart Evo (I don't think this should be remembered across multiple sessions) Ad static headers with mail scrolling below - I don't like this feature, since I want to see the header only once when I open the mail, then I remember (mostly :) what I am reading and who sent it (or I can still check for selected mail in the mails list) and I don't want the header to unnecessarily steal my precious vertical space.
(In reply to comment #6) > this patch adds +/- button to the headers field in email preview. When the > headers are collapsed, a single row with bold subject and sender's address is > displayed. Collapse state is remembered, so once you collapse headers in a one > mail, they will be collapsed in all other mails until you expand them again or > restart Evo (I don't think this should be remembered across multiple sessions) As for the patch itself, it works well. You are, however, leaking the evolution_imagesdir string in efh_format_headers(). Also, if the line winds up wrapping it would be nice if the text in the second line is aligned with the text in the first line, rather than starting under the [+] button. As for the feature, I guess I'm unconvinced of the need for it. I agree with your second paragraph that we don't want to mimic Thunderbird's behavior. It wastes valuable vertical space, and we also don't have context-sensitive buttons in that area like Thunderbird does. But what does the button accomplish, really? Just frees up a little more vertical space? In the preview pane one can just push the pane divider up to accomplish the same thing, and in the message window one can just make the window bigger. Are there other use cases that I'm missing? I think the feature needs more discussion.
Well, it can save about 60px in height for common mail (4 header rows), or even more for some mailing-list where there are 6 rows. I know it's not much but I'd rather see 5 more rows of text then some useless headers. I'd say that the reason is very same as why the "To" header is collapsable too: Information that I don't care about does not have to be on screen. And personally, I don't think it's such a big invasive change that would require some undeniable reason to be committed, as long as there will be at least some users who will definitely appreciate it (including all those with small or widescreen monitors). As I said, collapsing headers means having 4 or 5 more visible rows of message body without having to scroll down. And the 5 rows are often the difference between displaying entire message and having to touch mouse to scroll. I think the change is really small in compare to the great comfort of reading emails just by pressing the down-arrow and without having to resize the preview pane.
"Useful to a few, so why not" isn't a good enough reason. This isn't KDE. I'm not saying no to the feature, I just want to talk it through some more first. You said before that the expand state shouldn't be remembered across sessions, but I think I disagree. It seems to me the primary use case for this will be small screen devices or screens with limited resolution. Screen resolution is probably not going to change from session to session, so why should a user who prefers the more compact heading have to manually reset this each session (even if it -is- just one click)? We have two separate contexts for displaying mail messages. One is the preview pane, which shares vertical space with the message list and is probably where this would be most useful. The other is the dedicated message window, which shows nothing but the message itself and can be maximized. Probably less need for the expander in that context. Therefore I think we ought to have two persistent settings for the initial expand state: one for the preview pane and another for the message window. If we had that I think I'd be more apt to let the feature in.
Created attachment 185302 [details] [review] Fixed patch for collapsing headers I gave this a second thought and you are right indeed, the state should be remembered across sessions. This patch introduces headers_state property of EMFormatHTML which is then stored gconf, so that the state is remember across sessions. The state is stored separately for preview pane and for mail browser, although I think it could be little confusing for users sometimes, why the behavior of headers state is inconsistent. I was thinking about creating headers_collapsable property of EMFormatHTML and disabling the feature in mail browser, where it, as you said, does not have much sense, leaving it only in the preview pane.
(In reply to comment #10) > I was thinking about creating headers_collapsable property of EMFormatHTML and > disabling the feature in mail browser, where it, as you said, does not have > much sense, leaving it only in the preview pane. That makes sense, go ahead and do that. I'll look over this patch as soon as I can.
Created attachment 185307 [details] [review] New patch with collapsable headers only in preview pane This patch adds headers_collapsable property to EFormatHTML. The property is FALSE by default, which means, that the [+]/[-] buttons are not displayed. The feature is enabled only in the mail preview pane.
Patch works nicely. I only changed formatting a bit, to follow evolution's code-style, and also fixed possible leak of evolution_imagesdir in efh_format_headers with initialization of addrs to NULL with no return on missing From header and the "From:" text is translatable now. Otherwise kept it as it is. Created commit 7a61438 in evo master (3.1.1+)
*** Bug 635242 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***