unity-design team mailing list archive

[Jo-Erlend Schinstad <joerlend.schinstad@xxxxxxxxx>]

Den 27. sep. 2011 00:28, skrev James Jenner:
> I tried the Alt-F2 and disliked it mainly because I have no way of 
> knowing if it worked and I have no way of stopping it if it's a 
> process like ping. One area I can see it being useful would be to 
> restart a service or stop/start a service. But when I'm doing that I'm 
> generally doing a number of related activities that would necessitate 
> the use of a terminal (e.g. reconfiguration of a service and need to 
> restart).
Well, this is mostly the way that Alt+F2 has worked for at least ten 
years, so there's really nothing new there. We used to have some options 
in the dialog, though, like run in terminal, run with file and select 
applications. None of those make sense to me. If I want to run something 
in a terminal, I type "super+3 something". To do the same thing in the 
old dialog, I would have to type "alt+f2 something alt+t alt+r".
I know what I prefer.

> Perhaps an option next to the command line in Alt-F2 that states, run 
> in terminal. Thus if selected then a terminal window could open and 
> the command is executed in the terminal. Just a thought, but I think 
> that I would find useful.
I would much prefer super+3, or alt+f3 to open a new terminal. Having to 
first configure something like that by checking boxes is not for me. No, 
sir. Not at all.

> I'm also curious if anyone out there actively uses Alt-F2 and if so, 
> what type of commands are we talking?

I do, for various purposes (some prepended with gksu):
* /etc/init.d/some_service reload | restart | start | stop
* compiz --replace
* killall unity-panel-service
* killall firefox -9
* nautilus

I'm sure there are more. All of this is possible using a terminal, of 
course, but you save a few keystrokes when you're not interested in the 
output and you don't have to close the window afterwards.

Jo-Erlend Schinstad