Vertical view pane order

[The Real Bev]

I've been asking this every once in a while for a couple of years now...

In vertical view I would like to put the message pane (instead of the
message LIST pane) in the center so I don't spend most of my time with
my head cocked to the right. This (from
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Window_layout_-_Thunderbird#Layout) used to work:

Layout

To customize the layout, use a userChrome.css file. Here are
some examples:

Message pane at the top (classic view) or center (vertical view)

#messagesBox {-moz-box-direction: reverse;}

but stopped working some time in 2010. I even left the # in on the
theory that it wasn't a comment indicator, but NOOO!

Any new ideas?

--
Cheers, Bev
"Qui custodiet ipsos custodes?" --Juvenal

[Mike Easter]

I don't bave any experience with userChrome.css, but there's a
troubleshooting page here

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Editing_configuration/Troubleshooting If you
make changes to a configuration file but the changes seem to have no
effect, here are some common causes that you can check:


--
Mike Easter

[The Real Bev]

The only relevent items there were adding !important and restarting with
all extensions disabled. No change, except TB is really ugly. I don't
think there's anything in the .css files that prevents this change; I
put it at the top of the userChroms.css file AND the userContent.css
file just in case.

I have to assume that one of the authors did something that permanently
precludes this change and that I'm the only one on earth who cares :-(


--
Cheers,
Bev
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
"If anyone disagrees with anything I say, I am quite prepared
not only to retract it, but also to deny under oath that I
ever said it." -- T. Lehrer

[Mike Easter]

The Real Bev wrote:

> Mike Easter wrote:

>> there's a troubleshooting page

> I have to assume that one of the authors did something that
> permanently precludes this change and that I'm the only one on earth
> who cares :-(

:-/ ... like my beef about the loss of format=flowed compliance on
quoted content from Tb2 > Tb3, never to return :-/

<sob> nobody cares but me....


--
Mike Easter

[The Real Bev]

I JUST FOUND THE SOLUTION -- add this to userChrome.css

/* puts message page in the middle */
#threadPaneBox {-moz-box-direction: reverse !important;}


Thanks to Ron Whiteley at
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=623255

via Tobias Schmidt at
http://superuser.com/questions/244444/moving-thunderbird-message-pane-to-middle


Now I have to get used to it all over again :-(

--
Cheers, Bev
===========================================
Lawyering: the only profession that if you
didn't have it you wouldn't need it.

[The Real Bev]

On 05/14/2012 09:02 PM, The Real Bev wrote:

> On 05/14/2012 07:11 PM, Mike Easter wrote:
>
>> The Real Bev wrote:
>>> Mike Easter wrote:
>>
>>>> there's a troubleshooting page
>>
>>> I have to assume that one of the authors did something that
>>> permanently precludes this change and that I'm the only one on earth
>>> who cares :-(
>>
>> :-/ ... like my beef about the loss of format=flowed compliance on
>> quoted content from Tb2> Tb3, never to return :-/
>>
>> <sob> nobody cares but me....
>
> I JUST FOUND THE SOLUTION -- add this to userChrome.css
>
> /* puts message page in the middle */
> #threadPaneBox {-moz-box-direction: reverse !important;}
>
>
> Thanks to Ron Whiteley at
> http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=623255

This was posted in 2009. I've been looking for the solution since 2010.
Why did mozilla's search function NEVER find it? Google found the
answer below, though.

> via Tobias Schmidt at
> http://superuser.com/questions/244444/moving-thunderbird-message-pane-to-middle

I really wanted to thank Schmidt, but you have to create an account,
which requires captchas. I tried a dozen, with no success. Then half a
dozen of the audibles. Failed again. Why do they make it so damn HARD?
I sent them email, but I doubt that that will do any good either.
This set of captchas looks like the captchas for another site, which
also bombed out. Whoever this company is, it's definitely NOT user
friendly.

[Jim]

On 05/14/2012 11:18 PM, The Real Bev wrote:
>> Thanks to Ron Whiteley at
>> http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=623255
>
> This was posted in 2009. I've been looking for the solution since 2010.
> Why did mozilla's search function NEVER find it? Google found the
> answer below, though.

Mozilla has nothing to do with Mozillazine, so that probably has a lot
to do with it.

- Jim

[Mike Easter]

The Real Bev wrote:
>>>> Mike Easter wrote:
>>>
>>>>> there's a troubleshooting page

>> /* puts message page in the middle */
>> #threadPaneBox {-moz-box-direction: reverse !important;}
>>
>>
>> Thanks to Ron Whiteley at
>> http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=623255

That is also on the troubleshooting page:

// CSS rules are being overridden by other rules.
Try adding !important to any CSS rule that has no effect. Add it just
before the semicolon at the end of the rule. //

> This was posted in 2009. I've been looking for the solution since 2010.
> Why did mozilla's search function NEVER find it?

m'zine kb has a front page with a search tool here
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Knowledge_Base

... but I usually go in the Tb m'zine kb entry
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Category:Thunderbird Articles relating to the
Thunderbird e-mail and newsgroup client.

Sometimes I use the categories and sometimes I use the search.

I use m'zine kb more than mozmessage for help; I also hate it that moz
message powers stealth the newsgroups as a support function.

The newest Tb/s throw up a support display in the message window, which
support display and the pages it references have no guidance to the
newsgroups. Some people use Tb *ONLY* for its news agent functions
because they handle their email some other way such as gmail's cloud.

The shortsightedness that the powers are experiencing is that they can
only see the advantages of their support people supporting in webforums
with its moderation power and they fail to see the advantages that a
very large percentage of users and helpers see in nntp newsgroups for
support. Those advantages have been recognized a very long time and
those advantages are not going away in spite of the efforts of the moz
powers to hide the groups. One of these days they will probably just
eliminate the newsgroups altogether -- after all, if you have income in
the hundreds of millions but you have to beg giganews for a break on
providing a news server, you must not have much interest in nntp.

> I really wanted to thank Schmidt, but you have to create an account,
> which requires captchas. I tried a dozen, with no success. Then half a
> dozen of the audibles. Failed again. Why do they make it so damn HARD?

Just today I had to leave a page I was going to use and use a different
page/service because of an obscure captcha. I rotated the captchas
about 4 or 5 times but couldn't see one I could recognize.


--
Mike Easter

[The Real Bev]

On 05/15/2012 07:59 AM, Mike Easter wrote:

> The shortsightedness that the powers are experiencing is that they can
> only see the advantages of their support people supporting in webforums
> with its moderation power and they fail to see the advantages that a
> very large percentage of users and helpers see in nntp newsgroups for
> support.

Them the newer generation of "helpers" is just dumber than the older
one. It's just so HARD to decide which room to search when you have a
problem -- google tosses up everything and gives you a few lines so you
can tell you're at least barking up the right tree. Oh yeah, NEVER mix
metaphors :-)

> Those advantages have been recognized a very long time and
> those advantages are not going away in spite of the efforts of the moz
> powers to hide the groups. One of these days they will probably just
> eliminate the newsgroups altogether -- after all, if you have income in
> the hundreds of millions but you have to beg giganews for a break on
> providing a news server, you must not have much interest in nntp.

Long ago when Charter outsourced nntp to earthlink, the earthlink-usenet
newsgroup people were constantly crabbing about the service -- which was
indeed pretty bad. It eventually outsourced to highwinds, but I got
tired of calling customer service and being totally unable to find
somebody who even knew what usenet was -- best guess was that it was one
of those satellite things and they didn't support that :-(

>> I really wanted to thank Schmidt, but you have to create an account,
>> which requires captchas. I tried a dozen, with no success. Then half a
>> dozen of the audibles. Failed again. Why do they make it so damn HARD?
>
> Just today I had to leave a page I was going to use and use a different
> page/service because of an obscure captcha. I rotated the captchas
> about 4 or 5 times but couldn't see one I could recognize.

The ones that involve actual monetary transactions seem to work SOOO
much better; somebody must have figured out that keeping customers from
spending money was not a viable business plan.

BTW, I took a flying leap and just let TB11 update to TB12 without
creating a new defensive profile. Worked fine. No problems at all.
One less thing to worry about.

--
Cheers, Bev
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Warning -- Driver carries less than $20 worth of ammunition