Re: Gnome shell suggestions after a bit of usage

[Jairot Llopis <yajo sk8 gmail com>]

2011/7/7 Jasper St. Pierre <jstpierre mecheye net>

> 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.

This is being worked on. 

> 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.

So is this.

> 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.

This should be working. Make sure you have up-to-date versions of
gnome-shell, gtk+/gdk and Empathy. XEmbed isn't nice to deal with.

Thanks, I'm happy to see that I was not the only one thinking this. Anyway I just wanted to know if this was being worked on. I can wait for Fedora to package it.
 

> 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?

gconf right now. I have no idea if there are plans for a user-visible
setting right now. Sorry.

OK, i did not look gconf because I thought it was being replaced with dconf, where I did not find it.

Alright, here's some simple explanations.

>> 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.
>
> No.

I don't see any benefit to making them come out on hover, but talk to
aday on #gnome-design. He's working a lot on revamping the message
tray, so you can bounce some ideas off of him.

I think it's easier and quicker, or maybe it's just laziness on my part, but anyway I think there is some inconsistency: when you click on an icon in the system status area and then move to the next one, the previous one closes and the current one opens, but when you do that in the notifications area, you have to click again.
 

>> 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...
>
> No.

You clearly have no idea what you are talking about if you think a
Compiz plugin compatibility layer will be easy. It's not worth the
engineering effort so you can have your fancy useless wobbly windows.
It would probably be easier to rewrite the shell to be a Compiz plugin
than adding that to mutter though. You are free to try, though. Here's
some of the differences to get you started.

[...]

Well, as I said, I was completely ignorant in this respect. Thanks for the info.

Anyway I still think that at least some of those effects should be ported. KDE did, for example.

I'm not talking about making it a priority. I agree they are useless, but they are very nice too (maybe not for you, but for sure they are for many users).

In Gnome 3 you removed many things "from the past". But you always kept sure that there should be a useful replacement. For example, when removing the minimize button, you did it because its more useful to use workspaces, and I agree, and even searching trough dconf you can re-enable it.

In the past it was not necessary to care about those effects because if somebody wanted them, he only had to use compiz. But now, that is not an option anymore. Choosing between compiz and mutter has become choosing between Unity or Gnome Shell, which has become to choosing between any distro or Ubuntu. I don't want Ubuntu, I just miss those effects.

>> 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
>
> Irrelevant. Move it to an empty workspace, then ignore it.

Realistically, that's not a good solution. I've been pushing to
support the "persistent app" case better. You can find examples of
what I mean by this in a ton of other bugs and ML threads.

I agree completely. I see 2 perfect candidates to be a persistent app: Empathy and Rhythmbox.

Both of them are open in my desktop almost all the time, but for both of them I don't want to see them most of the time.

In the case of Empathy, right now the "classic" Empathy confuses me. There should be an only-notifications version. I don't see the point for having the contacts list in a separate window. Why is it not just embedded in the notification that opens when you click on Empathy's icon? The same with chat rooms. It's an obsolete interface, much better replaced with the notifications one. And it bothers me when it keeps blinking when somebody spoke me and I already answered him through the notification. I don't even like when I press alt+tab and Empathy is always there, messing around with the apps I directly use.

The same is true about Rhythmbox. It's an app I want to hear, not see, except for the rare cases when I need to browse my music collection.

Before Gnome 3 I used panflute, which I think is the best approach. It would be even better if we had panflute-like notifications, instead of having it always visible in the dock.

Right now, the approach I'm following is minimizing rhythmbox with a keyboard shortcut, and I'm sure minimizing is not what the developers want...

 

I apologize for my tone in advance, but I'm frustrated at this kind of
"proposal".

I'm sorry too, I really did not want to harm anybody out there. I'm just respectfully giving opinions and suggestions.

And as I said, you made a great job. I'm just trying to help you to make it perfect ;)