unity-design team mailing list archive

[Juan Montoya <th3pr0ph3t@xxxxxxxxx>]

Good point, Ian. I am convinced now that the dash must not absorb the
functionality of the run dialog.

The dash should remain user-friendly, especially for new users.

However, the behaviour I wanted would still be available through
lenses? I don't know much about Unity lenses, and at first I thought
it was the name for the transparent effect of the dash's background :$



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.
> 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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