Re: [Evolution] Auto Select First Message in List

[Patrick O'Callaghan <poc usb ve>]

On Wed, 2021-07-07 at 15:13 +0200, Milan Crha via evolution-list wrote:
> On Wed, 2021-07-07 at 12:35 +0100, Patrick O'Callaghan wrote:
> > Yes, I see. It's still very visually ambiguous as they both appear
> > to
> > be selected.
>
>         Hi,
> I agree, though it's a question of the theme. I do not like unfocused
> GtkTreeView draws as focused, in contrast to the message list, which,
> at least here, changes the selection color from blue to gray when I
> move away from it.
>
> > Is there a programmatic way of changing the focus to the
> > message instead of the folder?
>
> Yes, there is. Would it be the message or the message list? Both have
> its pros and cons.

I would favour the message, which seems more natural to me as itś
already highlighted.

> > And add (say) right-arrow as a shortcut to manually select the
> > highlighted message.
>
> The Tab or F6 are the standard keys to move between widgets in the
> gtk+ applications.

There are two problems with this.

One (minor) is that some of us only use a small number of GTK+ apps but
the rest of our DE is something else (KDE in my case), so even the
existence of this isn't obvious.

The other (more serious) is that Evo uses lots of widgets and tabbing
between them is a) tedious and b) has very poor feedback. Only the
Search bar actually shows any visual indication when you tab to it, and
that's after no less than 7 tabs from the folder pane, a fact that I
seriously doubt anyone even knows (I only discovered it by trying to
tab) since the natural action is just to click on it directly.

An arrow key that would switch focus directly to the highlighted
message would be easy to understand and overcome some of the problems
already mentioned, though I still think making the message be the focus
would be better. Perhaps left-arrow could go back to folder focus in
that case.

poc