Every now and then I open up Thunderbird to remind myself why I don’t use it.

Because Mail Act-on doesn’t work in Thunderbird and the available quick-filing extensions like Nostagly aren’t quite as slick, I find myself doing much more dragging and dropping than I do in Mail.app.

A neat little tweak from Horst Gutmann makes it all easier by creating a bigger mailbox list and, hence, larger targets on which to drop the emails.

His tip changes the look of the mailbox list from this to this:

(Or, if you are not making a screenshot to demonstrate the difference, something in the middle perhaps).

You will need to add some text to your userChrome.css file, which you will find on your ~/Library/Thunderbird/Profiles/xxxxxxxx.default/chrome/ folder.

Open it up in your text editor of choice and add the following code:

(You might want to change the pixel size to something slightly more modest).

Save. Close. Open up Thunderbird and enjoy bigger targets and a list that is easier to read. thunderbird, mailboxes list, hack, productivity, drag and drop, filing, tips, userChrome.css

By default Cocoa apps handle dragging and dropping text in an annoying way. You have to click and hold selected text for a bit before you can drag it. You can’t remove this annoyance, but a Terminal hack can reduce the frustration.

John Gruber drew attention to this over the weekend at the C4 Developers Conference in his presentation on “Consistency vs. Uniformity in UI Design”.

Carbon apps (AppleWorks, Microsoft Office, TextWrangler, etc) require no delay. Select. Drag. No Problems.

Cocoa apps (Mail.app, Safari, Mellel , etc) require that you hold your mouse down over the selected text for a moment before dragging.

You can reduce the built-in delay with a simple Terminal hack. Open Terminal and type (exactly):

This will reduce the delay from the one second default to a tenth of a second in all your Cocoa-based apps (‘-g’ stands for ‘global’).

You will, of course, need to restart the apps for the change to take effect.

In the past, I often got caught out by this in Mail.app, and ended up having to select the text I wanted twice. Not any more!

[Problem via TUAW , solution via Rob Griffiths at macOSXHints]mail.app, apple mail, cocoa apps, carbon, drag and drop, text, annoyance, apple