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lydell / LinkHints

A browser extension that lets you click with your keyboard.
https://lydell.github.io/LinkHints
MIT License
155 stars 8 forks source link

Thunderbird support #13

Open majutsushi opened 4 years ago

majutsushi commented 4 years ago

Would it be feasible to make LinkHints work in Thunderbird? Ever since muttator stopped working I've really missed being able to open links in mails using just the keyboard. So it would be great if that were possible. Thanks!

lydell commented 4 years ago

Hi!

According to MDN, Thunderbird does support Web Extensions so might be possible to run Link Hints: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/WebExtensions/Developing_WebExtensions_for_Thunderbird

I don’t use Thunderbird myself so I don’t know, but I would guess that viewing an email is like a browser tab in Firefox. So Link Hints would run inside each email, letting you click on links inside the emails using hints. I’m not sure that would be very useful? (It could also be that the entire Thunderbird interface is made of HTML and therefore could get link hints, but I wouldn’t bet on that.)

Since I don’t use Thunderbird myself, somebody would have to step up and do the work to add support and become a maintainer for the Thunderbird parts. Feel free to experiment with this and share the results!

But even if we managed to get Link Hints working in Thunderbird I’m not sure that’s what you’re looking for. Since you mentioned muttator – wouldn’t you miss the Vim-style keyboard shortcuts and mail client specific features?

I think you might be more interested in following this issue: https://github.com/tridactyl/tridactyl/issues/597

Finally, it might also be worth looking for/making an extension that adds just a few keyboard shortcuts – the one’s you miss the most.

What do you think?

majutsushi commented 4 years ago

Sorry, I wasn't very clear in my description. I was specifically talking about the first case you mentioned, where Link Hints would (only) run in the "browser pane" that an email is displayed in. The rest of Thunderbird is already reasonably easy to control with keyboard shortcuts (either built-in ones or ones provided by other extensions), only clicking on links requires constant switching between the keyboard and the mouse, which is rather frustrating and unergonomic. This is why I thought that Link Hints would be a good fit, since it only focusses on that part.

I'm not very familiar with JavaScript so I couldn't contribute anything right away, but I'll give it a try when I have the time. Thanks for the consideration!

ngriffin7a commented 4 years ago

+1 for a "Link Hints" feature for Thunderbird. I really miss Muttator since upgrading to Thunderbird 68.