Re: run dialog

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

On Tue, 26 Oct 1999, Ben FrantzDale wrote:
> 
> I've tried gnome's run dialog, but found it lacking
> First it start's unacceptably slowly. on my PII366 it's >1 second. Even on
> slow computers Windows' run pops up imedately (also, I think the way the
> windows keybord buffer works, you can start typing as soon as the program is
> opened, but before it has finished opening and the text ends up being
> entered anyway)
>

This is a hard problem, basically the little dialog is a full-blown Gnome
application with all the same startup time. We are trying hard to kill the
startup time for Gnome 2.0, though we really need better profiling
information. The current hypothesis is that the time is spent finding
shared libs.
 
Simplest fix is to move it back to plain GTK, like Elliot's original grun
program (though grun has its own issues and that's why I did gnome-run,
try grun out... ;-)

> Second, Gnome run doesn't have a keybord accessable history (in windows, if
> you hit the down arrow, it's like hitting up in bash)  In the same vein, tab
> completion would be a must (as well as an indicator of working directory)
> 

Right this is needed. 

> More things it could do to make it kick ass...  if you selected a file
> rather than an executable, it would open it with the default mime type from
> GMC (windows doesnt do this all the time...)  this could be extended so you
> could say edit:~/gimpingpic.png and have it be opened by gimp for editing
> rather than ee, say, for just viewing...
>

Cute, not a bad idea.
 
Basically, you should file separate bug reports for each problem/idea, so
they don't get lost - then at least people will occasionally be reminded
of the issues. http://bugs.gnome.org

However implementing all this stuff is probably just a fun weekend hack;
the core hacker people would _really_ appreciate it if someone with more
weekends than us would tackle it. ;-)

Havoc