Bug 86327

Version:            (using KDE KDE 3.2.1KDE 1.2)
Installed from:    RedHat RPMsRedHat RPMs
OS:                Linux

Hi,

Tabbed browsing is a very popular feature for power users.

I am wondering if there might be a use for tabbed email? I find tabbed browsing to be very fast and efficient both with the mouse and with the keyboard.

This is how I imagine it might work...

You start with the normal three pane view.

But if you middle click (or press Ctrl-T) a new tab is opened in the right hand side. Each tab contains a list of messages and below it the message contents pane. This way you could open up multiple tabs, with commonly used folders in them. Message searching could open up an additional tab. The standard keys Ctrl-PgUp and Ctrl-PgDown could be used to switch between tabs.

To allow more screen space, you could also make the folder list like a sidebar, with a hot key to turn it on and off (like the bookmarks pane in Firefox).

And above the tabs could be a location bar.

In the (optional?) location bar you could type the name of a mail folder, or some search keywords. This would be a fast way to switch the folder within the current tab. Or to start a new tab you could do:

Ctrl-T (new tab)
Ctrl-L (location bar)
Type: family (with autocomplete) -> open the mail folder called "family"
Enter (display the family folder in the tab)

Or if you could do a quick searhc like this:

Ctrl-L (location bar)

Type: search subject beach holiday
Press Enter: messages from the current folder which match the search keywords are shown. 

The tab title bar could make it clear this is a search view, not all the messages are shown (e.g. family: search: subject beach holiday). This would also allow you to easily operate on all the messages in such a view (similar to pine's Apply command), e.g. to select all of them (Ctrl-A) and Move them to a new folder called "beach".

Anyway, it would be a fair bit of work to implement, but I thought it an interesting idea, so I hope you do too. So thanks for listening.

See also another kmail wish bug 48176, I suggested some ways to make it faster and easier to use kmail with the keyboard.

Thanks for kmail,
Matthew.