Notification text is truncated. How to see it all?
I did an operation with Thunderbird, and it failed. A notification banner appeared in the top-right corner of the screen with a message from Thunderbird. The banner showed only two lines of text, which wasn't enough to display the whole message. I clicked on the notifications centre icon in the top-right of the macOS menu bar, displaying a list of notifications. The Thunderbird notification was at the top of the list. It showed three lines of text, which was still not enough to see the entire message.
How can I read the entire text of the notification which Thunderbird is trying to show me?
I guess what I expect is that Thunderbird will have an event log or console someplace, which has a copy of all the messages it sends to the OS's notification service. Alternately, I expect that the OS might have such an event log or console, in which case Thunderbird need not have its own. Right now, all I can find is Notification Centre, which truncates.
Apple's instructions for the Notification Centre say, "To open a notification in the app that sent it, click the notification." (https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204079) That was not effective for me.
I am using Thunderbird 68.8.1 on macOS 10.13.6 High Sierra.
Modified by Jim DeLaHunt
All Replies (3)
I found another clue on the Apple support forum. A user posted:
"Truncated Notifications Thunderbird.
"A while back, a question about how to get the entire notification displayed didn't seem to get an adequate answer. Solution on an MBA mid 2019: tap the notification with 3 fingers. HTH."
(https://discussions.apple.com/thread/251172223, 7 March 2020)
This was not effective for me.
In System Preferences… Trackpad… Point & Click…, there is an entry "Look up & data detectors", which says "Tap with three fingers". This option was unchecked on my system. Nevertheless, when I checked the option, then tapped with three fingers on the notification in the Notification Centre, there was no response.
Tried to do some digging around. I did find a bug report, but it seems to have not had any update or progress. I've enquired as to whether any progress, but.....
Notification Center limits the size of a notification to 256 bytes. The problem is that the alert is a message from server and so is not a specific size or length.
This info suggest that tapping would open eg: email in email client, but if the notification is purely informative and does not point to a specific piece of data within the application, when you click on the notification, it will only open the application or, if it is already running, bring it to the foreground. In a nutshell. it does nothing. The latter info sounds like the situation you are experiencing.
@Toad-Hall: thank you for these two links. I'm glad to see that there is a bug open about this issue. I'm less glad to see that the bug is 6 years old, with no progress. I guess that means I should not expect this to change soon.