Gnome-shell and moving across the menus

[Alexandre Kaspar <alexandre kaspar epfl ch>]

Hi everybody,

I wondered if there was a way to move between all those menus in the  
overview mode.
It's great to be able to access the overview and come back from it  
just by hitting the Window key (or some other combination of keys).
But then, you're stuck in the overview since you must use your mouse  
to select things.

Here, there are two particular movements which could be (and should be  
in my opinion) added :
1. move between the menu items, for example, <Tab> to switch between  
the menus (Seach, Application, Shortcuts, Recent files), and then the  
directional keys to select the menu item we want to use (within the  
currently selected menu).
2. move between the workspaces (and possibly add some or delete some)

Actually, the most important one which needs to be implemented is the  
first one as the second one is easily done while staying in the  
desktop mode where we can use <Ctrl><Alt>Left/Right to naviguate.

((Note :
 it would be great to have the possibility to naviguate also in the  
up-down direction so that we can have a lot more things in the session  
and still be able to use them all easily and fast (as long as we  
remember where it is).
Actually, we are stuck to the left and right neighboring workspaces.
That's not too bad, but it looks like a waste of space since it would  
be easy (looks like) to add the capability of moving up and down.
Moreover, that would really give us the impression that we are in an  
open area (add to it the fact to be able to cross the border to come  
back on the other side of the area and that would be perfect !).
))

To come back to the internal overview key movements, it is missing  
since we may all love mice, but I don't love touchpads as I do love  
mice...
On a netbook, it's better to use keys, and it's faster in my opinion.

And anyway, what would be the best way to try implementing those  
behaviours by myself (in C / Java / Javascript or whatever) ?
I would like to invest some of my time in gnome-shell. I suppose the  
sources are available on some svn/git/hg. Is there a documentation of  
it or only the inline code documentation ?

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