2011/9/28 Ian Santopietro
<isantop@xxxxxxxxx>
It is simple, but it isn't intuitive.
Pressing enter (in combination with any other key) indicates that you want to do an action with the item selected on the screen. We don't want the dash to search commands, as this is not end-user friendly. A new user should never have to know what a command is, and if our "simple" launcher exposes it to them, we've lost one battle right there.
In the Ctrl+Enter suggestion, the Dash will work exactly as before (no "searching commands"). It will function identically to the current implementation, visually and functionally, with a single difference: Ctrl+Enter will execute the search string directly as a command.
New users won't be confused, as nothing will change with regards to them. Advanced users won't be annoyed by closing and reopening the Dash when switching between searching applications and executing commands.
I'm not saying this is the best approach, just a good middle ground between the various suggestions in this thread. In fact, the best approach I've ever seen is the one taken by Gnome Do: one of the search results it displays is "execute command in terminal". This combines the current Dash functionality (searching applications) with Alt-F2 seamlessly and expands on it by opening a terminal window automatically. Since this option is usually displayed last, new users aren't confused (since the first 1 or 2 options almost always contain what they were searching for) and advanced users are not annoying (since they can press "up" and "enter" to execute the command directly).
Maybe something similar could be implemented in the Dash?