Thunderbird Quick Filter - Make Enter Key behavior configurable

[alexwi]

Posting here as suggested in https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1915770 - If you vote here, kindly vote on bugzilla as well. Thank you!

I use the Quick Filter / Quick Search extensively.

In the past, pressing Enter after typing the search criteria would have no effect and the Quick-search would continue normally. Since a few versions ago, pressing Enter stops the quicksearch and takes the user to Global Search. In my case, that's never my intention - if it were, I would've pressed Ctrl-Shift-F in the first place. When I type things in the quick-filter field, I want to stay WITHIN the mailbox in which I'm doing the search and just have messages filtered, regardless of whether I press Enter.

Having used Thunderbird for years, muscle memory makes it very difficult to avoid this issue, so it would be great if this were a configurable setting.

Currently some kind soul created an add-on to get the old behavior back (see the discussion in bugzilla - link above), but it really should be a setting.

Thanks!

[lingho]

How many people actually agreed with Bug 526221? Doing a global search can easily be implemented by adding another button under Filter messages by: just like when we want to search the body of mails when search string is not found in Sender/Recipient/Subject. Pressing Enter to activate Global search is both non-intuitive and hidden as a function. Without looking at the bug, I would have no idea it now opens a new tab and perform a global search.

Hitting Enter at a search box is common on many other popular applications including Firefox. Can you imagine if a user types a search string in Firefox search box, hit Enter and see a new tab opened and does something that is not obvious?

[mrsimon0007]

Is there a way to make pressing Enter in Thunderbird’s Quick Filter stay within the current mailbox instead of switching to Global Search, or to add this as a configurable setting?