Overview animation

[Alexandre Kaspar <alexandre kaspar epfl ch>]

Hi,

I've been with Gnome-Shell since it's early time before 3.0, but am now 
using it
daily on Fedora 17 (and previously 16), and I start to find the overall 
thing a bit painful to use,
mostly because of one flaw which is the animation when going from the 
default
view to the overview, which I use a lot for search (and application 
startup).

I find the zoom out/in animation just painful to see every time.
It takes time, it's not always smooth, and I just don't want to look at it.
It seems like a waste of my time, plus some more energy to focus on what 
is where
and why it's going to where it goes.

I saw ubuntu's hub system and the search which looks far much more 
user-friendly, in that
it doesn't take you out of the normal work. You keep the things where 
they are, but
you can search things, and have access to the dash on the left.

I wish there was a way to have a shorter overview system. Does it exist 
? Is it possible ?

i.e. <Super> would just trigger a basic overview without the layout part 
(no zoom-out, nor workspace display)
so that I can focus on what I'm doing and not the layout (which I find 
too superficial).
and then allow a full overview like today with <Super>+ some other key 
(Alt maybe ?)

I really find it painful to have to see this animation every single time 
I access the dash or the search.
Of course, I could just use <Alt>+F2 to trigger the command prompt, but 
there's no feedback with this one.
And I like the overview search, because I can do things with it, such as 
math computations, or unit conversion, or document viewing, or websearches.

Gnome 3.4 brought a great new layout management where we can put things 
in between the current workspaces,
and I find it great. But I just cannot stand to see it every single time.
Disabling animation doesn't help, because I want my current windows to 
stay where they are, just have a smaller overview
which would be on top of what is already present, and not an overview as 
now, where what is present
just gets scrambled in the middle of the screen.

Thanks for any solution or pointing me to what I should look for.
Alexandre Kaspar