Scrollbar on folder list pane

[NumberSix]

Just a "minor" aesthetic complaint, I suppose, but.... I detest seeing scrollbars on small panes... i.e. not "main content pane"-type places. In this case, I'm referring to the folder list. And esp. in this case because the scrollbar appears in the middle of the workspace rather than at the edge <shudder/> This is a dreadful design.

And of course it wastes a bit of real estate. I do NOT need the folder list to be scrollable*. The way it is in Classic is MUCH nicer. Any way to change this or hope that it will ever change?


* And this connects closely to another peeve of mine... the way the new themes all waste an outrageous amount of vertical space between folder names in the list. In Classic I use the "concise" theme, which is extremely compact. I love this (and although I'm not a fan of that color scheme, I've tolerated it because of the highly efficient use of real estate).

[n5bb]

I don't see the scrollbar you described. Do you mean a vertical or horizontal scrollbar? See this screen image of an old Guest account I use for testing:
Screen

There are several settings which can dramatically change the screen layout. Click the big multipurpose button in the upper left (with the mail icon) and choose Settings>Theme (the bottom selection at the left). You can choose four different themes (color and formatting choices), and four different layouts. The layout choice is easier to see if you have Classic selected. The Sidebar is the folder list at the left, while the folder pane appear on the right. If the Sidebar is hidden, the three-bar icon at the upper left is a toggle which will show or hide the folder list.

Of course, zooming the browser (CTL+ or CTL-) and making the browser window very small will result in scrolling, or you would not be able to view those parts of the display. But when I have the Sidebar visible with no reading pane, I have no scroll bars in the folder Sidebar unless I make the browser window very small vertically (less than half my screen height on the particular PC), as shown in the earlier screen capture link.

If you have a large number of folders visible you might get folder Sidebar vertical scrolling. You can choose to hide folders (or make them visible only when unread messages are present) in the Advanced>Folders screen. If you see a triangle adjacent to a folder, clicking the triangle will toggle open/close of that folder.

If you hide folders, you can still get to them easily using g <folder name>. So if you have hidden your Spam folder (which is actually Junk Mail in the Folders setup screen and IMAP client), you can type gspam <enter> to open the Spam folder. The "g" folder search will be dynamically shown at the left, and you can stop and move the highlight up/down and click <enter> (or just type "g" to open all existing folders and manually choose the one you want). If you have saved a search associated with a folder, it will be shown like a subfolder. Global searches are shown at the bottom. You can select a search just like a folder by using the keyboard shortcut g <search name>.

So if you hide your Spam folder but want to look through it, just type gspam <enter>, then use the j/k keys to move up and down to a message, then use the <enter> key to read that message (if the reading pane isn't enabled). Use ginbox <enter> to move back to reading your Inbox.

There are a lot of other keyboard tricks, such as using j/k to move to a message, x to select it, then continue moving and selecting until you have several messages selected, then use m <folder name> to move those messages to a folder. Entering "z" will undo the last action

Bill

[NumberSix]

Thanks for thoughts, Bill.... as you point out, my scrollbar is due to having a long folder list. See what it looks like here. I usually have my email window maximized in a 1280x1024 display, which I think is big enough that my not-ridiculously-long folder list should fit without scrolling :\

Yes, I can collapse some of the top-level folders to make it shorter and make the scrollbar go away, but I have mail regularly coming into those sub-folders, and it's inconvenient if I can't see them (I note now what I consider a bug... if I have unread messages in a sub-folder, ISTM that if I collapse its parent, the parent's unread indicator should show the sum of what's unread underneath it, but.... it doesn't).

Yes, I can Ctrl-minus to shrink the text size, but then everything gets smaller and I don't like that.

The way I see it there are two practical things that FM could do to alleviate this "problem": (1) make the folder list not a separate pane that the browser will try to scroll, but "fix" it to the mail list so that that they scroll together (like in Classic), or (2) release some more themes that eliminate all the wasted vertical white space. I'd love to see (2) happen.