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eno2001's Journal: GNOME: Gnome 2.10 Stuff I've Learned in the Past Week

Journal by eno2001

After spending a lot of time with KDE starting last November until about two weeks ago, I'm back to GNOME here at work. (I've been using GNOME at home the whole time) What I have to say is that there are some things about KDE that I definitely liked:

1. Konsole was THE killer terminal app. Not quite where I think terminal apps should be, but nonetheless leaps and bounds over all others.
2. The Window Manager appears to have more complete support for the ICCCM window management specifications. (Full screen a window, turn off window border, have it remember it's location, etc...) The only other environment that I've seen do it even better is Enlightenment.
3. The on-screen-display pop up style notifications that come from the media player or Konsole to let you know something is going on even if you're not on the same desktop.
4. KDE's implementation of "post it" notes seems a bit nicer than the one in GNOME although I'm getting used to it.

So back to GNOME. I posted a JE last week asking about Spatial file management and I learned a whole bunch of neat things about Nautilus that I didn't know before:

1. (Thanks Randall Revar): When you use a GNOME File | Open or File | Save dialog box, you can press Ctrl-l to specify a location to open to/from (even if it's hidden with a dot).
2. Using a double-middle-click on a "folder" in Nautilus will open that folder and close it's parent! Much better than Shift-Double-Left-Click like I'd been doing.
3. Dragging and dropping and object with a middle click give you the options "Copy, Move, Link" to the destination.
4. If you left click on the bottom left path list in a Nautilus spatial window to go up, you can middle click on the destination in the list to go there and close the current window.
5. (Thanks tomhudson): The File | Open Location option allows you to open files from many places even out on the Web. Pretty obvious but something I've always overlooked. I originally thought I was supposed to put file:///path/to/source in there.
6. The File | Connect to Server implementation IS as good as KDE's if not better due to the fact that remote locations appear as mounted devices on the desktop. I find this much more intuitive than sticking the mounted location in the equivalent of Windows "My Computer" folder. And a right-click | Unmount is a nice way of getting rid of the mount. :)
7. In any GNOME application that uses GTK+2.x, the File | Open dialog will display mounted remote volumes ("Connect to Server") along with the default Computer, Home, Desktop locations. When I was using Gedit yesterday I was able to open, edit and then save a file to a remote server using the SSH subsystem of Nautilus.

I think I'll be taking a trip back to Enlightenment land again soon to see what I've been missing since my last try at their CVS of 0.17. The last time I tried E 0.17 along with that fantastic launcher (Engage) I was mighty happy. The only issue I had was the process for creating your own launch icons and the fact that the application name for WINE apps is always 'wine' and you can't really change that. This makes it impossible to have launchers for specific WINE apps that don't have the word bubble "WINE" as their name. And if you try to change it to something like "WINE: Lighthouse", then the app won't launch at all because the window manager can't find an application with that name. (Nothing to do with paths, but more with Window classes) If only there was a good file manager for E. I don't like Evidence...


GNOME: Gnome 2.10 Stuff I've Learned in the Past Week

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