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How can I make Thunderbird go fullscreen in Linux? Specifically, I am using Mate at the moment.

Previously, I used OS X which had a shortcut (cmd+shift+F) for entering and exiting fullscreen. When I first transferred my profile from OS X to Linux, Thunderbird was in fullscreen (so it seems like the setting might have carried over from OS X), but it somehow exited fullscreen and now I can't get it back. Searching Google only turns up results of people trying to get out of fullscreen, so that plus my own experience seems to indicate that it is possible to activate fullscreen in Thunderbird though it is not obvious. I tried F11 (standard shortcut for fullscreen for Firefox and other applications) but that didn't work. I also tried various javascript commands through Keyconfig (things like BrowserFullScreen(); or goDoCommand('View:fullScreen'); that I found suggested for Firefox but they did not work either.

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  • Is that not the same as the window manager's "Maximize" function, usually a button in the window's titlebar? Searched for a bug in Thunderbird?
    – Xen2050
    Feb 6, 2015 at 9:36
  • No, by fullscreen, I mean that the window has no window decoration and covers any panels that the desktop environment usually draws around the borders of the screen. Besides that, the fullscreen window should cover the screen like a maximized window. If you have Firefox on Linux, you can try pressing F11 on a maximized window to see the difference.
    – ws_e_c421
    Feb 7, 2015 at 0:08
  • I'm still looking for a way to do this. For me, "full screen" should be just the content of the email, without any of Thunderbird buttons or recipients or sender stuff. This is useful for emails that are all HTML and the content starts underneath a big photo or image, which is becoming more and more prevalent to date. I don't think this is possible.
    – Adam
    Aug 5, 2017 at 12:55
  • Relevant bug report: bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=499516 Apr 27, 2019 at 21:50

3 Answers 3

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Open the localstore.rdf file in your profile folder (~/.thunderbird/xxxxxxxx.profileName) and search for sizemode="normal" in the chrome://messenger/content/messenger.xul entry and change it to sizemode="fullscreen". Then restart Thunderbird.

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  • Thanks, this does work. Ideally, there would be a more user friendly method of changing this setting, but for now this works for me.
    – ws_e_c421
    May 14, 2015 at 1:10
  • Thank you! This helped me in restoring Thunderbird back to maximized mode (I don't know why it became fullscreen) Feb 24, 2016 at 14:09
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@Kaan Akgök's answer is still valid, but Thunderbird doesn't use localstore.rdf anymore. Instead, you will have to change the file ~/.thunderbird/what_ever_profile_name/xulstore.json. The first sizemode (in the messengerWindow element) needs to be set to fullscreen to enable fullscreen mode (so that part didn't change).

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Try using Alt+F11 works on Xubuntu 14.04 LTS

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