Re: Very hidden menu in gnome-shell

[Adam Tauno Williams <awilliam whitemice org>]

On Fri, 2013-03-29 at 21:20 +0200, Ozan Çağlayan wrote: 
> I've been using gnome3 for a year or more now.

Same here.

>  I can say I'm pretty OK
> with it but I hope it well get better and better in the next years.

I'm far beyond OK; I really like Shell, the extension system, and the
way my desktop behaves.  It is a major improvement over the previous
GNOME 2.x.

> But recently I discovered something which I really didn't find obvious
> and intuitive. I was searching a way for sorting items in Nautilus 

Oh yea.  Nautilus has IMNSHO, suffered under GNOME Shell.  And it hasn't
gone it a good direction, loosing features over time.  I know people who
won't upgrade to GNOME 3.6 as Nautilus uses split panes - a terribly
awesome feature when used in combination with GVFS.

> Then I thought that "OK so they didn't implement ordering for listed
> items, fine." for 6 months or so. 

Well, sort of.  In preferences there is a "List Columns" tab, one
available column is "Type".  That at least lists folders together.

> Bingo! I found that when you click "Nautilus" tab next to activities
> (when Nautilus is running) you actually have a bunch of things instead
> of a single "Quit" action that I encounter with firefox. 

.... You mean when you look in the App Menu?  That is where global
application stuff is found.  Firefox doesn't put anything useful there
[I suppose because it isn't a "GNOME app"].  But most GNOME applications
have more stuff there than quit.  Applications are still adapting to the
GNOME App Menu.

So I do not believe that menu is hidden at all.

In nautilus at lease the difference between the "gear" button/icon/menu
[sheesssh, that's 'intuitive'] and the right-click-in-the-window is what
I find baffling.  

> There in preferences there's an option "sort folders before files".

Yep.  BTW, that has been in the Preferences dialog for a decade or
more. 

> So finally I think that is a quite hidden place for a Preferences and
> other actions.

Yes and no, it is where it is expected.  But one has to get used to
using the App Menu, it is sort of a stealth feature.  I'm not really
sold on it - but all the cool kids are into global menus now, so they
are probably here to stay.

FYI#1, you can turn off the App Menu.

gsettings set org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.xsettings overrides
'{"Gtk/ShellShowsAppMenu": <int32 0>}'

But you may not like that behavior any better for applications that only
have a "Quit" option.

FYI#2, there is a hot-key bound to the App Menu: <super>F10   That makes
the App Menu as a 'intuitive task-oriented usability feature' more
usable when it locates a menu option there relating to an application
that is 36 inches away from the menu itself.

>  Second think is that why there's some ordering options
> in nautilus's "down icon" menu for grid but nothing for "list view"?

Because in list view you can just click on the column headings.