Table of Contents

Reducing the Height of the Interface in Thunderbird

Introduction

Thunderbird is not well adapted to the small screen height of the EEE. In order to make it more vertically friendly, we will do three things:

  1. Install a theme like miniBird.
  2. Reduce the number of addresses in the Composer.
  3. Globally reduce the font size.

See also How to shrink firefox

The resulting compose dialog will look like the following:

(It is also possible to move the toolbar icons onto the menu bar. Just right click the toolbar, customize, then drag the icons to the menu bar. The toolbar can then be turned off in view toolbars. This tip can be applied to firefox too)

Installing a Smaller Theme

  1. Launch Thunderbird and go to the Tools→Add-Ons menu.
  2. Click the Get Themes button.
  3. On the webpage that comes up, scroll to the the Browse Themes by Category link and choose compact.
  4. Pick your favorite compact theme. I chose miniBird: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/1064
  5. Download it and install it according to the instructions on the website (don't click the Install Now button or firefox will try to use the theme).
  6. Restart Thunderbird to finish the installation.

Reducing the Number of To Addresses in Composer

The Thunderbird interface is completely customizable by XUL files that live inside special JAR files in the Thunderbird install directory. There is an easy way to do this, and a hard way.

After either set of instructions, add the last 3 lines in the section below to your userChrome.css file. You do not have to change the font size if you do not want to.

Note for eeeXubuntu users: The path where the messenger.jar is stored is /usr/share/thunderbird/chrome instead of /opt/thunderbird/chrome

Easy Way

  1. Download http://www.cs.pitt.edu/~jmisurda/eee/tbird/messenger.jar
  2. Copy it to /opt/thunderbird/chrome (You will need to be superuser to do this) and overwrite the original.
    • hit CTRL+ALT+T to open a terminal and if you downloaded it to the desktop, at the terminal type: cd Desktop
    • then type: sudo cp messenger.jar /opt/thunderbird/chrome
    • Or you can do it drag and drop from the file browser by choosing the menu item to show all filesystems and copy it to /opt/thunderbird/chrome/

Hard Way

  1. Make a backup of the messenger.jar file, so that it can be replaced if there is a problem:
    sudo cp /opt/thunderbird/chrome/messenger.jar /opt/thunderbird/chrome/messenger.jar.backup
  2. Extract the existing messenger.jar from the /opt/thunderbird/chrome directory like so:
    unzip /opt/thunderbird/chrome/messenger.jar -d ~/messenger/
  3. Edit the XUL file for the composer dialog
    cd ~/messenger/content/messenger/messengercompose/
pico messengercompose.xul
  4. Look for the line containing <listbox id=“addressingWidget” flex=“1” seltype=“multiple” rows=“4” (it's line 582) and change the 4 to a 1 (or 2…whatever you want)
  5. Save!
  6. cd ~/messenger
  7. Recreate the jar file:
    zip -r messenger.jar content
  8. Copy this to the Thunderbird directory:
    sudo cp messenger.jar /opt/thunderbird/chrome/

Changing the Overall Font Size

  1. cd ~/.thunderbird/
  2. cd to the directory that ends in .default
  3. cd chrome (If it does not exist, create it)
  4. pico userChrome.css (If it does not exist, create it)
  5. Change the contents to:
    *{
    font-family: sans-serif !important;
    font-size: 8pt !important;
}

#MsgHeadersToolbar {
    min-height: 25px !important;
}
  6. The font-size can be anything you want.
  7. The MsgHeadersToolbar section sets the composer window “To:” section to be smaller (in concert with the edited messenger.jar)

Note for eeeXubuntu users: The path in the first step should be ~/.mozilla-thunderbird instead.

Dealing with the addressbook card editing dialog

The dialog window used to edit a single address book card does not fit by default in the reduced screen-height of the EeePC. Even though the dialog itself can be resized to fit within the available screen, no scrollbar will ever appear, leaving the OK/Cancel buttons at the bottom out of reach. The simplest workaround to this problem is to move the dialog window (partially) outside of the upper limit of the screen, so that the OK/Cancel buttons become reachable:

  1. press and hold the ALT key
  2. click on any part of the dialog - except its title bar, and drag it up until its bottom edge is within view
  3. release the ALT key
  4. if the OK button is still not visible, resize the dialog by clicking on its bottom edge until it appears
  5. repeat this process as many times as needed

Finished!

References