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Removing the New Event Button from Thunderbird v115 Calendar

Posted by Daniel Lange on
DebianOpen Source

Thunderbird in Debian stable (Bookworm) has received Thunderbird v115.3.1 as a security update.

With it comes "Supernova", a UI redesign. There is a Mozilla blogpost with a walk-through of the new UI.

Unfortunately it features a super eye-catching "New Message" button that - thankfully - can be disabled. Even the whole space above the email folder pane can be recovered by disabling the folder pane header at Burger Menu (☰) -> View -> Folders -> Folder Pane Header.

Unfortunately there is no way to remove the same eye-catching "New Event" button for the Calendar view via a UI setting.

Thunderbird New event button, German locale

This needs a user CSS file to override the button as non-visible.

To make it process the user CSS Thunderbird needs a config setting to be enabled:

  1. Burger Menu (☰) -> Settings -> General
  2. Scroll down all the way
  3. Click the Config editor... button on the bottom right
  4. Accept that hell will freeze over because you configure software
  5. Search for toolkit.legacyUserProfileCustomizations.stylesheets
  6. Toggle the value to true to enable the user CSS

You can manually add user_pref("toolkit.legacyUserProfileCustomizations.stylesheets", true); to ~/.thunderbird/abcdefgh.default/prefs.js to the same effect (do this while Thunderbird is not running; replace abcdefgh with your Thunderbird profile ID).

Now create a new directory ~/.thunderbird/abcdefgh.default/chrome/, again replacing abcdefgh with your profile ID.

Inside the new directory create a userChrome.css file with the following content:

/* Hide Calendar New Event button */
#primaryButtonSidePanel {
    display: none !important;
}

Restart Thunderbird. And enjoy less visual obstruction when using the Calendar.