Re: want dash to be always-visible dock

[Sriram Ramkrishna <sri ramkrishna me>]

On Sun, Apr 3, 2011 at 8:50 AM, Adam Dingle <adam yorba org> wrote:

On 04/03/2011 08:13 AM, Ryan Peters wrote:

On 04/03/2011 09:12 AM, Adam Dingle wrote:

I've been using GNOME Shell recently on Fedora 15.  Aesthetically it looks nice, and I like the full-screen application launcher with integrated search.  But I definitely want a dock which is always visible on the side of my screen (a la Docky, Plank, Avant Window Navigator and so on) and to use it as my primary means of managing open applications.  So for the moment I'm running both GNOME Shell and Plank.  That works, but feels kludgy for a few reasons:

1. I see one dock (Plank) on my display at all times, but the GNOME Shell Activities view shows a second, independent dock (the dash).

2. Since I use Plank for window management, I don't often need the Expose view, so I really want the Activities button (and system key) to open the Applications view directly.

3. The window minimization effect zips toward the Activities button in the upper left, but I want it to zip downward toward the bottom of the display, where Plank is visible.

I'd like to know whether the GNOME Shell developers would accept patches toward either of the following goals:

1. A preference, command-line option or GSettings key which tells GNOME Shell to display the dash at the edge of the screen at all times.  This would allow me and others with similar inclinations to use the GNOME Shell dash instead of Docky or other docks.  In this mode, Activities would directly open Applications since the dash is used for window management.  Ideally the user could choose which edge of the screen the dash should be displayed on.  The dash would auto-hide when other windows overlap it (just like Docky and other docks).

and/or

2. A preference, command-line option or GSettings key which tells GNOME Shell to simply never display its dash, and that Activities should directly open Applications.  This would be convenient for users who want to use an external dock program.

If the answer is no on both counts, then I'll need to look at alternatives to GNOME Shell in its entirety.  It would be nice, however, if we could find some way to make GNOME Shell play nicely with always-visible desktop docks.

adam
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The GNOME Shell Extensions repository on git.gnome.org has a dock extension that integrates with the shell (though it displays on the right, not the left like on the activities menu; that should be changeable if you can read the source). Even still, I don't see how hard it could be to press the Win/Super/Meta key to get to the activities overlay quickly. I use that as a dock replacement and it's just as fast and stays out of my way without the annoying auto-hide feature some docks use to stay out of my way.

Link: http://git.gnome.org/browse/gnome-shell-extensions

OK - I didn't know about this dock extension and just tried it out.  Even with this extension, all three of the user interface glitches that I listed as kludgy above still apply.  Still, this might be a starting point for further development.  I wasn't aware of gnome-shell-extensions at all before now, and it's nice to see there's a place to experiment with changes like these without necessarily having to take changes in GNOME Shell itself.

You can change all kinds of behavior using extensions including writing your own dash on the left.  There are also some window manager type stuff you can do as well.  I do not think that you can get rid of the dash on gnome-shell overview without removing the code for it in the gnome-shell source.  One of the devs will have to chime in about that one.

But as Ryan said, I prefer the dock in the overview and out of my hair in the main screen so I dno't have to manage it.  I do however use GNOME Do which I use to do sshs to other machines although not necessarily to launch applications.  I've been forcing myself to use the overvewi but the GNOME Do makes it so much easier since I get instant gratification without the animation.  I bet an extension can be written to do the same thing that GNOME Do does.  That'll be fun.

sri