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Thunderbird's focus shifts to the wrong tab

  • 2 replies
  • 1 has this problem
  • 2 views
  • Last reply by Cara_M

Cara_M
Cara_M
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I don't generally like tabs. I'm more of a "windowing" person. But even if I resign myself to using tabs in Thunderbird, they're not working very well.

I use search a lot. I type in a search term and (thanks to an add in) get back a LIST of emails that I want to read. I also use threaded conversations so, when I double-click on the resulting list to open an email (because I prefer to open and not read in the message pane), I often get MORE than one email (from that conversation) opened in a tab. So I go to the last opened tab, and hit the DELETE key to delete it -- and Thunderbird jumps me back to the Inbox tab, which may be many many tabs to the left of the next email that I want to review.

Pain in the butt. Set the focus to the NEXT MOST RECENT tab (the one immediately to the left of the one I was just in).

Any add-ons that might do this now?

I don't generally like tabs. I'm more of a "windowing" person. But even if I resign myself to using tabs in Thunderbird, they're not working very well. I use search a lot. I type in a search term and (thanks to an add in) get back a LIST of emails that I want to read. I also use threaded conversations so, when I double-click on the resulting list to open an email (because I prefer to open and not read in the message pane), I often get MORE than one email (from that conversation) opened in a tab. So I go to the last opened tab, and hit the DELETE key to delete it -- and Thunderbird jumps me back to the Inbox tab, which may be many many tabs to the left of the next email that I want to review. Pain in the butt. Set the focus to the NEXT MOST RECENT tab (the one immediately to the left of the one I was just in). Any add-ons that might do this now?

All Replies (2)

Zenos
Zenos
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The Global Search results page has a button labelled "open email as list" which displays its findings in a conventional Thunderbird listings window. That window has never given me any issues with unwanted opening of multiple messages. So your addon may not be really necessary.

There again, I use the message pane below the mailbox listing almost exclusively. I don't see the attraction in all the extra clicks involved with opening messages in tabs or even their own windows. And if I'm opening messages in a conversation or thread, I specifically want to see their temporal/logical relationships. Viewing messages from a thread or conversation in their own separate tabs or windows just isn't helpful, IMHO.

Like you, I dislike tabs, at least in the context of email. I don't see tabs as appropriate to email workflow, and Thunderbird's tabs in particular are poorly and incompletely implemented.

There is a setting in Tools|Options to set Thunderbird to open messages in windows rather than tabs, and you can tell it whether to reuse a single window or use multiple windows. Have you explored these options? (Not that I'd consider a plethora of windows any more manageable than a long row of tabs!)

Cara_M
Cara_M Question owner
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Zenos -- your suggestion to look into Tools > Options again helped me stumble on an extension that I was using that I thought was helping me -- except that I had its settings wrong.

It was the reason that the focus was shooting over to the far left, instead of the immediate left, and I can now ESC out of a tab and be moved into the next-most-recent.

Thanks