Re: GNOME user environment brainstorming

[Vlad Harchev <hvv hippo ru>]

On 24 May 2001, Havoc Pennington wrote:

 Hi, 

> Hi,
> 
> At Red Hat we were trying to come up with a list of stuff to hack on
> for future GNOME versions, and came up with a lot of possible TODO
> items for the GNOME user environment. Some of these are clearly in the
> GNOME 2 oe beyond timeframe, some might be hackable into current
> stable versions. The list is far longer than we can do ourselves, so,
> maybe it will give people project ideas. We'll probably do some of
> them though. No doubt user testing is in order to decide which of
> these ideas are lame.
[...]
>  - Joe Smith's Preferences
>      (user preferences, such as fonts/colors; this would replace
>       control center with a folder full of icons a la Windows/Mac, and
>       we'd want to rename dialogs from things like "Theme Selector" to
>       things like "Fonts & Colors")

 FWIW, it seems "Fonts & Colors" is a bad substitute for "Theme Selector"
(since you won't be able to configure colors there - only select themes and
fonts). "Appearance" is much better IMO.

[...]
> - On desktop, perhaps show "Havoc Pennington's Home" instead of 
>   "hp's Home"
> - For user prefs folder, use full name also, "Havoc Pennington's
>   Preferences"
  
 It would be nice to make the name format configurable ("My foo" vs 
"userjoe's foo" vs "Joe Smith's foo" vs "foo").
 
> Default prefs
> === 
> 
> - disable tearoff menus by default
> - disable tearoff menubars by default

 I think tearoffs is a very useful feature and they should be enabled by
default - they don't take much space. It's one of the big advantages of gtk
over other widegsets, and they are erally very useful (e.g. when searching for
some document in the "Recent documents" user has just tear off the folder menu
rather than navigating to that submenu each time).

 I wanted to add that gnome is still lacking keyboard shortcuts for programs.
I begining to think that it's technically easy to implement reliably in a way
Panel in gnome-1.4 supports shortcuts for "run program" and "show menu"
actions - by just stealing keypresses from X (by grabbing keys) - this will
work with *any* window manager.

 After keyboard shortcuts for programs are implemented, the next step is to
implement "runonce" mode for shortcuts that will make mouseless work with
gnome really possible and efficient - when such shortcut is pressed it's
checked whether a program has been already launched using that shortcut - if
it's not, program is started, if it's already running - just uniconify,
unshring, raise its window and switch to desktop that program is running.

 Best regards,
  -Vlad