Firefox has a sweet suite of developer tools. If you haven’t used them, you’re seriously missing out.
Thunderbird, on the other hand, has very little in the way of developer tools. We used to have ChromeBug, but then that project went by the wayside when the Firebug developers decided to focus more on, well, Firebug.
And ever since, debugging and fiddling around in Thunderbird has been a pain.
So a few folks on the TB team decided to take a crack at porting one of Firefox’s tools to Thunderbird. We chose Scratchpad (or rather, its earlier incarnation, “Workspace”), because being able to execute snippets of script on the fly is super-useful for trying stuff out.
So without further ado, here it is – Workspace for Thunderbird.
Install that, and a new Workspace menuitem appears under Tools. This will open up Workspace. Make sure to switch your Context to Chrome for superpowers.
This will be very helpful in extension development or bug fixing. I added it to https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Extensions/Thunderbird but it should be advertised more, e.g. in the newsgroup etc.
Request for enhancement: The default scope should be chrome, not content.
Yeah, I think we need more “developer tools ” like this.
My JS is rusty, but I could see this being useful in bug triage where the developer needs to know for instance, the value of a variable in question. Experienced non-dev types like me could easily paste in a quickie script to provide that info.
I know it’s not that simple, but still, maybe another useful tool. Besides that, it will be fun to play with. :}
Ahh..We have another cloud computing conundrum here.
You didn’t mention that.
http://www.workspace.com/workspace/workspace.html
No thanks
I’d rather keep my JS local FWIW, and not have it bouncing off the “cloud” and back to me.
Hey Joe,
The add-on I posted has *nothing* to do with the product that you linked to. The code you write stays local.
-Mike
Great addon. I am not a developer, but I have some little programming skill and sometimes I’ll try to make little enhancement with userChrome.js, this addon is very useful for me, thanks.
I have only a little request, if possible, I can add it via userChrome.js, but I think this could be useful also for other: is it possible to add the keyboard shortcut Shift+F4 as in Firefox?
Sandro
I dont think this theme works well in opera, it looks a bit – jagged.