Dear lazyweb,
I have been using the awesome “Google Calendar Tab” to have my calendar in Thunderbird. However, if I restart Thunderbird, I have to remember to open the tab again – and if I forget, I don’t get reminders. Also, because I have my message pane set to use a fixed-width font, the Google Calendar also appears in a fixed-width font, which is pretty ugly.
So I’d really like two features added – “start when Thunderbird starts” and “ignore message pane formatting preferences”. I emailed clarkbw, the extension’s author, but it turns out he only accepts feature requests in the form of pull requests into his source repo on github :-|
I have rather a lot on my plate right now but if this blog post inspires someone to add those features, that would be awesome!
Thunderbird content tabs are persistent, and calendar tab is just implemented as something that opens a content tab. While the regexp navigation stuff will get lost, it seems like it should already work? (Although things may be freaky in the restored tab…)
Is something broken with your Thunderbird session store, or have you turned it off? (ex: if you open a message tab, and quit, then restart thunderbird, does the message tab come back)?
Andrew: Hmm, you are right, it does do that when I test it. I’ll watch more carefully in future, but I swear I’ve seen this not work.
Our session store does favor losing your state over wedging Thunderbird into a state where it crashes at startup every time. Specifically, if Thunderbird terminates without a clean shutdown within the first few minutes of being started, we will lose our state.
In a nutshell, on startup, we read the file, then delete it. We write out our revised state on a timer or on closure of the 3pane window. The timer interval is currently 5 minutes as an arbitrary decision by me to be friendly to people with laptops.
I like the way you think man.
You rock.