GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 617002
Message composer should make a better use of space
Last modified: 2021-05-19 11:37:12 UTC
The message composer fits fine in 1024x600 (the resolution used by netbooks), but it makes very poor use of the space available. The controls take up most of the screen and you get left with little space for your actual message. * The menu bar is seldom used. * The toolbar is too big. * The "From" drop-down wastes a whole line of space if you only have a single mail account. * Do you really need a "Signature" chooser? * There is the "normal" amount of space between the From/To/CC/Subject lines, but this adds up to a significant amount of vertical space. Can we make the spacing smaller? * The biggest waste of space is in the HTML widget's toolbar, which is two tall lines full of icons and combo boxes. Srini started a "lite" version of the composer, which needs to be turned on in the code. Look for e_msg_composer_lite_new(). This removes the menu bar and toolbar, moves the "Send" and "Save Draft" buttons to the bottom bar, and generally makes the controls more compact. However, this is not finished yet. I'll work on this.
For the record, I'm not real thrilled with the way the "lite" stuff is hacked in at the moment. I'd rather it be done through subclassing (Anjal should've had its own EMsgComposer subclass -- I was willing to make whatever accomodations were needed on the Evolution side), but it will likely require some in-depth class design rework, which may be out of scope here.
Sorry, I was away yesterday at a conference, so I haven't had a chance to actually see how the composer is coded. I'll be glad to refactor things as needed. Do you have any concrete ideas? I'm sure you know that code better than I do :)
Might make sense together with porting the composer to webkit in 3.7.
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