unity-design team mailing list archive

[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.

You can't make it hidden either, since then it isn't clear what exactly will
be done, which is also bad design. With present and past Alt+F2
implementations, you can always see what exactly will run when you press
enter. The old Gnome-panel Run Command dialog was dedicated to this. The new
Unity implementation does this and tells you visually what will happen by
presenting the command as a search result.

And, this would likely include removing the standard Alt+F2 access, since
having both would be redundant and bloated. This brings back the whole
problem that Unity's Alt+F2 solved in the first place.

On Wed, Sep 28, 2011 at 12:54, Stefanos A. <stapostol@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> 2011/9/28 Ian Santopietro <isantop@xxxxxxxxx>
>
>>  But Alt-F1 triggers keyboard navigation of the launcher, not the dash.
>> You can switch directlyfrom there to either dash or the Run dialog without
>> any other action. To open the dash, briefly press and release Super, which
>> is a very different shortcut from Alt-F2, and not likely to be confused. It
>> is true they look identical and serve very different functions, but be cause
>> they are each accessed so differently, it's unlikely that a user would open
>> one when they meant to open the other.
>>
> You are right, please replace all my "Alt-F1" references by "Super". That's
> what you get for writing without coffee in the morning.
>
> As for it being unlikely, I'd argue that it isn't. There are many times
> where I hit Super only to decide I'd rather enter a command rather than
> launch an application. Right now it's impossible to mode-switch easily,
> because you have to close and reopen the Dash. This fells ugly.
>
>> And one might use "killall Thunderbird" to terminate Thunderbird if it
>> freezes. It was a rhetorical example, but the point is that sometimes it is
>> useful to run a command without opening a terminal, particularly if you
>> would then immediately close the terminal.
>>
> Indeed, which is why I use the Alt-F2 prompt. What I am arguing for is a
> way to access Alt-F2 functionality from the main Dash. Several ways were
> presented. My favourite so far: Enter key launches application (as now);
> Ctrl+Enter interprets the text as a command.
>
> Simple and intuitive.
>



-- 
Ian Santopietro

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