Gnome shell suggestions after a bit of usage

[Jairot Llopis <yajo sk8 gmail com>]

I have been using for a short time Fedora 15 with Gnome 3, and I want to share some of my points of view about it, and I hope the developers are pleased with them and take note.

First of all, congratulations. It's in general terms a great job, and I am enjoying it.

Now, the suggestions.

I'm a person who almost always uses the keyboard, and I think gnome-shell is more focused in mouse usage. I'd love being able to use the keyboard to select items in the activites view. Using the arrow keys, or ctrl/alt/shift + arrow keys to that would be great. For me, having the left-side pannel with apps or the main panel of open windows is almost useless if I cannot reach it with the keyboard. I'm faster typing the name of the app.

Talking about the windows and useless screen space, is not the title too thick?

Also, there is no way to reach the notifications with the keyboard. I would love to be able to use a hotkey to focus on the current pop-up if there is one, and if there is not, it could work for displaying the bottom notifications panel and entering some kind of "navigation mode" on it, allowing me to open and close the remaining notifications with the keyboard.

By the way, talking about notifications, if I move the cursor over them it's only because I want to open them, so why do I have to click? There should be an option to let you open the notifications just by hovering over them, the same way than when they have just popped out.

There is also another annoying thing about notifications: some (i.e. Rythmbox) can be clicked on the icon and the text (nice), but some others (i.e. Empathy) can only be clicked on the icon (not nice). I prefer the first behavior.

Allow the top-panel to auto-hide just as the bottom one. I readed somewhere that the top-panel is something like a visual anchor that allows the user rememeber where he is... well, I perfectly know where I am, and, honestly, the biggest part of the info displayed there is not really something I need to see all the time. If that doesn't change, I prefer to have more space in the screen.

There is a problem when using Inkscape and the Alt+click combination. It is needed for that program, but usually window managers use it to move the window by default, but allow the user to change it, for example, for mod4 + click. I didn't find that in Gnome 3, and this is very annoying when using Inkscape. What about an option for that?

 I'm not sure this is the right place to talk about this, but I have to say it: Rhythmbox lacks a close to tray option and beautier (and more useful) notifications, and... where did the screensaver configuration go?

Finally, we all love effects... Sincerely, i miss so much the gelatinous windows and all that nice compiz stuff. When you show your computer to a windows-rules friend, that's the first thing that amazes them. I hope those effects are soon ported to mutter, but, instead of that, maybe a compatibility layer to run compiz plugins with mutter would do the trick. In fact, it would save you thousands of lines of code. I ignore if this is even possible, but that's why I ask...

Be happy ;)