menu search vs. toolbar search
There seem to be two ways to search for emails in TBird: one is from the menu (Edit | Find | Search messages), the other is from the toolbar. I assumed the two were the same under the hood, but apparently that's not the case. The one I get to from the menu is clumsy (I need to fill in a bunch of info if I don't want the default), and excruciatingly slow. The one from the toolbar is simple and amazingly fast.
I prefer not to use the toolbar (it's a waste of space, and I use the keyboard, not the mouse--and I have the search key ^K assigned to something else). How can I get to the toolbar-type search from the menu?
Chosen solution
The global search has just one user interface, the toolbar widget. So it is not about making is hard to find, it is about you turning off the user interface object (toolbar).
Thunderbird actually has three "search" methods. Two of them rely on toolbars being visible, so you are left with the third. This probably would have been removed around version 3 then the other methods first appeared, but the other two methods to no lend themselves to supporting the saved folder feature, so we still have "find"
Find does search sub folders, so you are limited to "per account" or "per folder root" searches, not just per folder searches.
There is much of Thunderbird's features that have no menu shortcut or shortcut key at all. To try and use the product without a toolbar is a bit like trying to ride a bicycle with one pedal in my opinion. You are crippled for the gain of two lines of email.
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I think the answer to your question is you can not.
Thanks. I'm familiar with boolean search and searching in various fields etc., but the search from the menu is so slow that unless you already know what folder something is in, it's unuseable IMO. And to not have the quick search accessible from the menu is simply dumb, IMO. Well, at least I know how to find it now.
Chosen Solution
The global search has just one user interface, the toolbar widget. So it is not about making is hard to find, it is about you turning off the user interface object (toolbar).
Thunderbird actually has three "search" methods. Two of them rely on toolbars being visible, so you are left with the third. This probably would have been removed around version 3 then the other methods first appeared, but the other two methods to no lend themselves to supporting the saved folder feature, so we still have "find"
Find does search sub folders, so you are limited to "per account" or "per folder root" searches, not just per folder searches.
There is much of Thunderbird's features that have no menu shortcut or shortcut key at all. To try and use the product without a toolbar is a bit like trying to ride a bicycle with one pedal in my opinion. You are crippled for the gain of two lines of email.
I understand all this, my complaint (and I guess at this point it is a complaint) is that the UI forces you to use the toolbar/ mouse if you want certain capabilities. IMO, if there's a menu, you ought to be able to do everything with the menu that you can do with the toolbar. This is not, after all, Microsoft Office with its "thou shalt use the toolbar [aka ribbon]".
Fortunately, afaict there are only two things you can do with the toolbar that you can't do with the menu, namely Quick Filter and (fast) Search. I just wish there were zero things like that, rather than two.
It wouldn't be that difficult to add a menu item to a gui, at least not with most programming languages (dunno with C++, I've managed to avoid that...).
And yes, of course Find can search subfolders... if you have a long time to wait. That's what I meant by "unuseable": not that it doesn't exist, but that it's so slow when searching subfolders that it might as well not exist.