unity-design team mailing list archive

["Stefanos A." <stapostol@xxxxxxxxx>]

2011/9/26 Mikkel Kamstrup Erlandsen <mikkel.kamstrup@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>

> On 09/22/2011 08:46 PM, Jo-Erlend Schinstad wrote:
>
>> Den 22. sep. 2011 20:40, skrev Alex Launi:
>>
>>> Can someone explain why we think we want the ability to run rm directly
>>> from unity anyway? Is there a single person who wants this functionality who
>>> doesn't have a terminal open all of the time anyway?
>>>
>>
>> rm is a bad example. But being able to restart compiz using "compiz
>> --replace" without opening a terminal and running "nohup compiz --replace"
>> is a good reason to keep it around. Or to quickly open a root nautilus.
>> (Which itself is an example of situations when it should not be necessary to
>> run a command) Stuff like that.
>>
>
> Just for historic reference: The Alt-F2 mode in Unity was added because
> there was a *major* uproar from users that it was gone, when we transitioned
> from the Gnome2 panel. So we added it back.
>
> Personally I don't get what people use it for instead of just having a full
> featured terminal around, but apparently it is very important to a lot of
> people. So I accept that :-)
>

Having a way to enter one-off commands without opening a terminal is pretty
useful. Maybe you wish to kill a misbehaving process or ping to see if your
connection is working? Alt-F2, enter command, done. Why is that better than
opening a brand new terminal? Because it avoids the need for window
management or (heavens forbid) desktop management for an one-off command.

Unfortunately, Alt-F2 is a little too underpowered as it cannot run commands
in external terminals (e.g. if you ping, Alt-F2 creates an invisible zombie
process). Gnome Do used to offer such a "run command in terminal" choice,
which was very very useful.

Myself, I have now moved to drop-down, quake-style terminals (like guake)
which stand somewhere between Alt-F2 and full-fledged terminals in
functionality. In fact, Alt-F2 is very close to a drop-down terminal in
appearance - but sadly not in functionality. This is not a huge gap to close
(just embed a terminal window under the Alt-F2 prompt!) but I somehow don't
see that happening in the near future. :)