Flat Style Feature: use the color of custom colored tab for active folder

[RealRaven2000]

After working on #643 all day yesterday, fixing alternative themes such as pushbutton and native tabs I found that the change of a colored tab to the dedicated active tab color a little irritating. I think it might be better to change the color of the underbar according to the custom palette entry / color if a tab had selected a particular color: this will add a more cohesive experience and ultimately will make navigation easier.

I will add this as a new optional feature but probably preselect it for users to switch off who want the old behavior.

Current behavior, with active tab set to red:

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Desired behavior - underbar takes the "override" color of the user defined custom color of any colored tab:

I think this is a lot fresher and also it does match the color to the color on the current folder bar which adds even more cohesion.

[RealRaven2000]

Test version below:

QuickFolders-mx-6.14.3pre69.zip

• added forced coloring from current custom colored tab.
• added an option to switch off behavior (under Active Tab color pickers)
• to do: localization of the new option + tooltip
• BONUS: fixed color scheme behavior for svg icons on active tabs

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To install version above download zip file and drag the file into Thunderbird Add-ons Manager (do not extract contents, it won't install like that). You almost certainly should restart as style sheets are cached aggressively by Mozilla apps.

[ScriptHippie]

Testing your updates for Appearance "flat style"
(on macos 15.7.3, QF 6.14.3pre69, TB 147.0.2)

I like the bottom line as indicator, and it looks elegant 💎.

The override setting makes sense, but let me raise two caveats:

• With the setting checked, if one has more than one folder tab with the same custom color, it becomes hard to differentiate which tab is current when using "filled style". In your example screenshot above, this is not noticeable because custom colors are only used once each. With "striped style" it looks great because the current tab displays filled and becomes unique that way.
• With the setting unchecked, the bottom line always shows the active tab color regardless of which tab is selected, even if no tab is selected. So this "color information" become superfluous, and thus it seems it might be better not to show the bottom line at all, if the setting is unchecked?

[ScriptHippie]

Testing your updates for Appearance "flat style"
(on macos 15.7.3, QF 6.14.3pre69, TB 147.0.2)

A few small issues to report:
(tried 2color, standard and pastel palettes, did not try night vision palette)

• The color picker floating window stops working after a while, only a few color panels react to a mouse click, the rest does not – color picker does not appear. Can be helped by closing and reopening the quickFolders options.

• The colors for "hovered" and "drag over" appear with a fade that takes about 1 second. At some point, the fade stops working for "hovered" and the color change happens immediately. Works again after relaunching TB.

• It might be an idea to have the fade-in time as a preference setting? (maybe this exists already...)

• The "drag over" text color does not work (there is no change when dragging over)

• When choosing a custom color, tab text remains black and does not respect the configured text color (see screenshot below; this is "color 3" selected from the standard palette. The folder label in the tool bar below is displayed as expected though)

[RealRaven2000]

I like the bottom line as indicator, and it looks elegant 💎.

thanks for testing - the actual line is not new, you can already adjust it here:

The override setting makes sense, but let me raise two caveats:

• With the setting checked, if one has more than one folder tab with the same custom color, it becomes hard to differentiate which tab is current when using "filled style". In your example screenshot above, this is not noticeable because custom colors are only used once each. With "striped style" it looks great because the current tab displays filled and becomes unique that way.

The default style for the active folder is underlining the folder name, I think that's even behavior that goes across all themes since inception of QuickFolders. Of course when you color stuff, this can become much more ambiguous - as yes colors aren't unique and nothing prevents you from using the same color for a custom tab and the active folder status; in the end it is more of an aesthetic choice. But you could use it for categorizing tabs, e.g. choosing a color for a client and then painting all tabs related to that accordingly. I still think the new behavior is better than sticking to the color and removing the custom color on activation as it constantly messes with that association.

One thing I was thinking of was adding a fat outline to the active tab, but I might have to make the tabs bigger for this to avoid "jumping" on active change.

• With the setting unchecked, the bottom line always shows the active tab color regardless of which tab is selected, even if no tab is selected. So this "color information" become superfluous, and thus it seems it might be better not to show the bottom line at all, if the setting is unchecked?

The colored bar (with the active color) was designed this way deliberately - it just has the background active color and "fuses" with the active tab (as long as you only have a single row of tabs; connecting across multiple rows would be a lot more messy, so I didn't implement that.

Hiding the line [or better making it transparent to avoid jumping] (if nothing is active) might be another new option to consider.

[RealRaven2000]

• The "drag over" text color does not work (there is no change when dragging over)

Thanks seems so be a regression - it appears to load the background-image (a linear gradient + text color) only for the very first time and then stops working, clearly a problem removing (or adding) CSS classes, which could be caused by my recent changes. Need to test this.

• When choosing a custom color, tab text remains black and does not respect the configured text color (see screenshot below; this is "color 3" selected from the standard palette. The folder label in the tool bar below is displayed as expected though)

this works for me - when you choose a custom color, you mean via the QF Commands » Tab Color picker?

When testing, QF can get confused when you toggle between themes - it might not remove all the CSS rules - so it may be necessary to restart Thunderbird to see the real behavior.

[RealRaven2000]

one more point - you can overwrite the text color of the palette presets with the left color pickers.

These color pickers are OS specific widgets I do not know how they actually behave in Mac OS.

[RealRaven2000]

I did some repairs on drag + drop should be a lot better again. dragging right especially had a problem (it superimposes a triangle to the right using the background-image style attribute. now we use as pseudo element injecting either of the unicode characters ◀ and ▶, and replaced the existing gif images dragRight.gif and dragLeft.gif. While I was at it I also found the dragUp and dragDown icons and found issue #647, (broken change order dialog, a very old dialog I made before I coded drag+drop reordering on the toolbar itself) which I now fixed with more modern style rules - and also made it more theme aware.

QuickFolders-mx-6.15pre105.zip

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To install version above download zip file and drag the file into Thunderbird Add-ons Manager (do not extract contents, it won't install like that). You almost certainly should restart as style sheets are cached aggressively by Mozilla apps.

[RealRaven2000]

We still have one fundamental problem - if the current folder (with custom color) is left behind and a folder without any tab is selected, then the bottom bar doesn't default back to the "active tab" color. This should definitely be fixed next.

[RealRaven2000]

We still have one fundamental problem - if the current folder (with custom color) is left behind and a folder without any tab is selected, then the bottom bar doesn't default back to the "active tab" color. This should definitely be fixed next.

Just fixed this:

QuickFolders-mx-6.15pre106.zip

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To install version above download zip file and drag the file into Thunderbird Add-ons Manager (do not extract contents, it won't install like that). You almost certainly should restart as style sheets are cached aggressively by Mozilla apps.