Fix Thunderbird 115's title bar and remove search bar

thunderbird-115-fix.md

Thunderbird 115 introduced a new look. I hate it. Not only does it no longer fit in with KDE Plasma, it lost functionality due to it's new integrated search bar in the title bar.

So I went on a mission to fix it.

To restore the regular title bar:

Go into Settings > General > Language & Appereance and uncheck the Hide system window titlebar

To remove search bar:

Toggle toolkit.legacyUserProfileCustomizations.stylesheets to true in Config Editor (bottom of Settings)

Find your profile directory via Help > Troubleshooting Information > Profile Directory (or about:profiles in same page)

This directory should have lots of files e.g. prefs.js and places.sqlite

Create directory chrome Inside that folder, create a file named userChrome.css with the below content:

#unifiedToolbar {
  display:none !important;
}

Restart Thunderbird

Enjoy!

Note if you're using the Flatpak your profile directory will be different than the one listed in the above instructions. It will be
~/.var/app/org.mozilla.Thunderbird/.thunderbird/xxxxxxxx.default/ or similar.

Good to know to restore the regular title bar. But why would someone want to remove the search bar? You cannot search emails afterwards (it is not exactly the same function as "quick filter").

I can't recall but I think I didn't use it as much as it took up space and I tend to go to my webmail to do searching.

Big thanks for this. No idea why anyone needs a titanic, monitor-spanning search bar. I don't think I've ever tried to search for an email.