OT: Thunderbird v60.3 worse for news reading

When it gets stuck you can use the 'n' key to move on instead of the space bar

I logged a bug for it a while ago

I had to dump Thunderbird for mail/calendar. Evolution seems a bit better.

I use Pan for news, but had to fix an old version because somewhere in a release they f***ed it up.

It's not the only obstacle, but a shoe-in for Outlook would really help sell "Linux on the Desktop" in a lot of areas.

Clive Page snipped-for-privacy@page2.eu posted

... for example that it doesn't wrap lines.

Ive used Thunderbird for years and didnt know the space bar did that, I always use the mouse.

Mike

Thanks, I didn't know that (nor how to discover such useful short-cuts).

In message <psjh2l$lio$ snipped-for-privacy@dont-email.me, Jethro_uk <jethro snipped-for-privacy@hotmailbin.com writes

I'm pretty fed up with newsreaders, but good old Turnpike on a virtual machine still feels like home and I still stick with it. The VM makes it slow, but otherwise I put up with its ancient habits.

I installed Thunderbird on another machine, but when I came to use it 2 years later just for one newsgroup a few weeks ago, it kept putting up a really annoying screen that wanted me to login to my gmail account. The login screen didn't work at all. That was v 45, I discovered today. Maybe the login "send" button pointed somewhere obsolete? This thread tempted me to hit the update button, it updated to V 52, I've logged in at last via the nag screen, it has downloaded about 2 years of rarely read emails, and the thing has become usable.

I did use Pan a lot in the past and was about to try again, but since the rewrite, I haven't tried it. Now Thunderbird is working I probably won't bother.

I always use "n" for Next...

I didn't know about the space bar functionality. Will that disappear when my Thunderbird upgrades itself (which it is threatening to do when I restart it)?

Cursor keys for next, previous, expand thread, collapse thread.

I'm on 60.3. I didn't know about the space bar shortcut until a few seconds ago. I do now, and it works as described.

It's possible, of course, that the OP's description was incomplete and that the functionality in 60.3 is not quite the same as the earlier functionality.

Well I've been using the space-bar functionality for a good many years, but the other day it only worked on some posts not all. The only change was that I took the upgrade to Thunderbird v60.3. So I think it must be that. But it could be that some other setting affects this as a side-effect.

I've just upgraded to 60.3.1 and the space bar is working all right.

I've since found that if the post is more than a page long, the space bar scrolls down. Once I reach the end of the post, pressing space again moves to the next post. Which is useful for properly trimmed and interleaved posts, but a minor PITA when people top-post.

Did it scroll on longer posts before the update, out of interest?

It might be relevant that I have the preview pane disabled. I haven't tried it, and don't intend to try it, with the preview pane.

It did scroll down on longer posts as expected, and after reaching the end another press of the spacebar *sometimes* moved on to the next message, not *always* as it used to. I think that it was failing to move on if the next unread message was not the next one in the hierarchical list but some way further down. So maybe it's not generally broken, but only for some configurations. A pity mine is one of the latter. There are so many configuration options, it would take excessive time to test them all.

I use Thunderbird but strictly only for email. For usenet, I'm using Pan which also uses the N and Spacebar keys in exactly the same way (a fact I also didn't cotton onto for the first 12 to 18 months).

With Pan, pressing the spacebar pages you down a long post until you hit the end, whereupon the next press jumps you to the next post regardless of whether it has been marked as read or not - if you do this on the very last post in any particular news group, it takes you back to the first post in that group.

Pressing N jumps you to the N(ext unread) post until there aren't any more unread posts in the group with subsequent presses of the N(ext unread) key leaving you stopped at the last, now read post without jumping to the beginning of the group (nor into the beginning of the next group).

I never realised that Thunderbird used exactly the same shortcuts until now - I don't normally receive enough emails to justify considering any need for such handy shortcut keys. :-)

I know that feeling. Many years ago a manager at work decided that all development changes must be tested with every possible combination of software settings before being released. The policy was quietly dropped after I pointed out that it was a 13 digit number :-D

No, but it becomes a little less reliable, I usually prefer space-bar as it both advances within the message, and advances to the next message, the problem with v60 is that sometimes it "gets stuck" and needs a prod of the N key anyway.

Thanks, I've added a comment that it still happens in 60.3.1.