368454 - Dynamic quote level coloring during plain text compose

Status: NEW

(Thunderbird :: Message Compose Window, enhancement)

Description

[Daniel Beardsmore]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-GB; rv:1.8.1.1) Gecko/20061204 Firefox/2.0.0.1
Build Identifier: version 1.5.0.9 (20061207)

When composing a plain text mail, the quote coloring is set statically when the compose edit field is populated. This falls apart when you split up a quote into smaller fragments to quote separately, leaving parts of your message blue and parts of the quotation (arrows, generally) in black.

Further, all quote levels show as an identical color making it quite hard to see who wrote what when you wish to snip older levels of quotation from the message.

I am attaching a sample movie taken from Macintosh Outlook Express 5.02 from 2000, showing dynamic quoting: addition and removal of quote arrows changes the text colour accordingly. Thunderbird really falls down on its ability to intelligently manipulate a message being quoted, compared to Microsoft's -- of all people! -- effort from nearly seven years ago.

This is in DIRE NEED of being rectified as it makes message composition subtantially easier.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Select a mail and hit reply
2. Find deeper levels of quotation and remove them
3. Break apart a quoted block and reply to each part separately
Actual Results:  
For 2: the text colour should dynamically adapt to the quotation level
For 3: you should be able to tell the levels by color

Expected Results:  
For 2: you end up with wrong colouration as Thunderbird never readjusts the colour after the window is populated, with stray text shown in the wrong color
For 3: all the quoted text is misleadingly coloured the same

Comment 1

[Daniel Beardsmore]

Attachment: A movie showing how Mac OE 5 dynamically adapts quote colouring

This is how Microsoft implemented it nearly seven years ago, you cannae let Microsoft get the better of you! Seven years...

Comment 2

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

Confirming RFE.

Comment 3

[Vladimir Kotal]

I need this as well. (too many too deep mail threads sitting in my Inbox)

Comment 4

[Daniel Beardsmore]

I don't know what I've done, but something attachment related has now removed even the blue colouration of quoting during compose. Granted, it never worked properly anyway, and you had to battle to not be typing yourself in blue, but it was at least something.

Given the paucity of comments here, I imagine that it will be a chilly day in the evil one's domain before Thunderbird gets anything resembling a viable compose system, be that plain text or HTML.

Comment 5

[warren crossing]

this is up to the theme to color the text - seamonkey/extensions/[e-mail]/chrome/modern!/messagecompose/messagecompose.css

looking at css attribute selectors it should be possible to (although I couldn't get this working)

span[_moz_quote='true'] {
color: GREEN;
}

but to do it based on indentation levels - with different colors, that's outside of css and would require another attribute such as _moz_quote_depth


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