Re: GNOME Run Dialog, su, uris, tabs, files and GNOME 2.6

[Frank Worsley <fworsley shaw ca>]

Hi Sven,

I did some work rewriting the run dialog for 2.4 and tackled most of the
issues you mention. See my comments below and also the ChangeLog entries.

>  * run as
>    use a lib that the gksu-team is currently working on to provide
>    that.

This has not been done.

>  * tab ompletion
>    tab completion should be added to make users start their
>    applications faster

This has been done for executables in your PATH. For example, if you enter
"moz" it will complete it to "mozilla". It would be nice to do this also
for the last recently run commands and for files in the file system. A
drop-down lists ala webbrowser style would be nice too.

Handling completion for filesystem paths/uris is a little tricky. There's
been a message posted to this list about this already, look in the
archives for it. Basically, the problem is knowing whether the user is
entering a URI (wihout the method:// part), or an application command or a
not-fully-qualified file path. Look at the code to see how we currently
try to smartly determine what the user is entering.

>  * uri support
>    should be possible to open any gnomevfs uri with the right
>    application

This has been added for 2.4. All uris supported by gnome-vfs work in the
run dialog. Handlers for other uris can be setup in gconf. See ChangeLog
for details. This goes hand-in-hand with the gnome_vfs_url_show function I
added.

>  * file support
>    should be also able to start abiword if i select a .abw file

This is also fully supported in 2.4, assuming your MIME types are setup
correctly. Again, see the gnome_vfs_url_show function. There's also
gnome_url_show which delegates to the vfs function and just adds nicer
GErrors on top of it (instead of plain vfs return codes).

Some other ideas I have for the future is basing the command-line applet
on the same code as the run dialog. They basically do the same so I think
they should share the same code. Disclaimer: I've never used it or looked
at command-line applet code.

Cheers,

- Frank