Re: Alt-F2 "Run Application" slowness vs. Command line applet speedness - gconf?

[Gábor Farkas <gabor z10n net>]

Albert Vilella wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I repost an issue that makes me feel the gnome desktop could improve
> in this aspect:
>
> I'm used to the Alt-F2 "Run Application" shortcut for triggering the
> start of an application, but I find very annoying that it takes so
> long to show up (usually 3-4 seconds), because of the searching for
> available programs that allows for the autocompletion in the text
> field. Apparently, this searching process through the directories is
> very IO-bounded in terms of responsiveness.
>
> I think this could be improved, by not generating the list of programs
> every time, as an option, so that the responsiveness is similar to the
> "Command line applet". In this tool, there is a history of the most
> used calls, so there is autocompletion for those, and it is ovbiously
> faster.
>
> Maybe this is something that could be included in the
> "yet-another-option-bag" gconf, and edited via gconftool.
>
> Any comments?
>
>     Albert.

there is a bug about this:
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=133243

from that bug it seems that the speed of the alt-f2 could be improved 
with not looking thru all the files, but only the files which have a 
matching prefix/first-letter.

it's too bad there's no voting system in gnome-bugzilla,
because imho this is soo bad...

for my personal use alt-f2 is unusable.
yes, the wait is 'only' 4-8seconds, and it does 'only' happen 2-3times 
every hour, but that's enough to make it's usage painful.

in contrast, for example kde's alt-f2 dialog does not do 
filename-completion..well, it does, but only a history based one.

but, it's FAST. and imho that's the primary use-case for alt-f2.
it's for people who KNOW what they want to launch.
if i want to look around, i start nautilus or browse the main gnome menu.

for now, i usually start a terminal with a keyboard shortcut, start the 
app i want to start (with &, so it detaches from the terminal). and 
close the terminal. it's MUCH faster than to use the alt-f2 dialog.

i really, really does not want to sound inpolite or ungrateful, but:
alt-f2 didn't always work like that. in earlier versions (gnome-2.2? 
gnome-2.4? i don't remember),  it didn't do this statement completion.
then someone decided to improve it. he added this feature, but did not 
consider the impact of it. this was imho a bad move.

so, please: apply some of the patches/ideas from that bug and/or add a 
gconf-switch do disable statement-completion in alt-f2.

make it usable again ;)

gabor