The popular QuickText addon has not been updated for Thunderbird 38 and no longer works. As a user of that addon, I wanted to make it work again. This post provides instructions on how to do that.

The addon has no license mentioned, and unfortunately that defaults to “all rights reserved”. That means that I cannot provide the modified source to download, but I can under “Fair Use” describe the needed changes, that you can do yourself. They are trivial (at least for my use case). I will describe the changes for the non-Pro version but presumably they are the same for the Pro version. The only problem is that the template file is written in one format, but is read in a different format so that it does not work.

To edit the source, first you need to uncompress it. The QuickText .xpi file is just a renamed .zip file, so extract this file with your favorite zip utility (I use 7-zip). Find the file named components/wzQuicktext.js Find the line (near line 570) that looks like this:

if (bomheader == "\xFF\xFE" || bomheader == "\xFE\xFF")

Modify that line by adding an additional condition to be this:

if (bomheader == "\xFF\xFE" || bomheader == "\xFE\xFF" || bomheader.length == 1)

That’s it! Now you just have to select all of the files in the addon, and put them back into a ZIP archive re-named as .xpi

I changed a few other meta details such as the version number and compatibility, so here is a link to the actual patch that I use:

http://mesquilla.net/releases/quicktext.patch

I’ll keep contacting the author trying to either get the official version modified, or a release that allows me to modify it. But you should be able to do this yourself and run a modified version.

http://mesquilla.com/2015/07/15/fixing-quicktext-addon-for-thunderbird/