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Adding background color or other visual differentiation to email-list column headings

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  • Nzaghachi ikpeazụ nke sfhowes

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I would like an option or add-on to make the [Legacy Table] email-list column headings (Tag... From... Subject... Etc.) more visually distinct. As is, they look exactly the same as a read message -- same font, not bold, no color, etc. I support some very inexperienced Thunderbird users, and they have a distressing tendency of accidentally clicking on a column heading, which changes the email-list's sort order -- and often confuses them. I'm thinking that if the column headings had a background color tint (the specific color doesn't matter), it would make it more obvious that the heading row is not just another message. Taking the idea one step further, if the color for the selected sort-order column was a darker shade than the other columns, it might even be more obvious that the headings are in fact a *control*, not just another read message.

I would like an option or add-on to make the [Legacy Table] email-list column headings (Tag... From... Subject... Etc.) more visually distinct. As is, they look exactly the same as a read message -- same font, not bold, no color, etc. I support some very inexperienced Thunderbird users, and they have a distressing tendency of accidentally clicking on a column heading, which changes the email-list's sort order -- and often confuses them. I'm thinking that if the column headings had a background color tint (the specific color doesn't matter), it would make it more obvious that the heading row is not just another message. Taking the idea one step further, if the color for the selected sort-order column was a darker shade than the other columns, it might even be more obvious that the headings are in fact a *control*, not just another read message.

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I attached a mockup of how it might look...

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This can be done with css:

#subjectColButton, #correspondentColButton, #dateColButton, #attachmentColButton {
  background-color: #87CEFA !important;
  font-weight: bold !important;
}


Help/Troubleshooting Info, Profile Folder, Open Folder, close TB, create a new folder named chrome, create a new document in chrome with a text editor, name it userChrome.css, Save as type: All files *.*, copy in the above code, change the colour as desired. Double-click toolkit.legacyUserProfileCustomizations.stylesheets to true in Settings/General/Config. editor, restart TB.

Online css generator

To change the colour of the column picker:

@namespace html url("http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml");

html|th[is="tree-view-table-column-picker"] {
  background-color: #87CEFA !important; 
}


You can of course add other columns or have different colours for different columns. See attached picture.

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Geoff Walker said

I support some very inexperienced Thunderbird users, and they have a distressing tendency of accidentally clicking on a column heading, which changes the email-list's sort order -- and often confuses them.

See https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-us/thunderbird/addon/no-message-pane-sort-by-mouse/versions/