[desktop-discuss] CDE removal ?

[Calum Benson]

On 7 Mar 2008, at 11:40, Douglas Atique wrote:

> Just an usability comment.
> One feature of CDE (in particular dtfile) that I miss too much when  
> using gnome is the simple Ctrl+T keyboard accelerator to open a  
> terminal with the same cwd as the directory shown in the file  
> manager. That's a time saver. Gnome forces me to use the mouse to  
> open a terminal.

You can assign desktop-wide keyboard shortcuts to whatever command you  
like (e.g. 'gnome-terminal'), in the Keyboard Shortcuts prefs window.   
Probably not easily possible to open a terminal *and* have it change  
to the file manager directory this way, but you could certainly get a  
terminal window open to get you started.

(If the file manager directory is particularly convoluted, you could  
then drag any file from that window into the terminal to paste its  
pathname, which you can then edit into a cd command.)

> A last observation. Who would care about a Documents folder in the  
> desktop? I really need a shortcut to my home folder, and I am forced  
> to open the Documents folder and cd .. to get home. All in all, I  
> think gnome targets only novice users, and tries to be a replacement  
> for Windows desktops. I hope they will improve soon.

This is a hangover from the early versions of JDS (not GNOME), which  
did explicitly target Windows switchers.  One of the requirements from  
Sun marketing was to minimise retraining for those users, and since  
there's no Home folder on Windows, we hid it as best we could too.

Interestingly, Indiana has (presumably in error) ditched some of those  
Home->Documents patches but not the others, so we have a bit of  
sorting out to do there.  Luckily, you'll all have an opportunity to  
comment on a first draft of the Indiana desktop UI spec in the next  
day or two :)

Cheeri,
Calum.

-- 
CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer       Sun Microsystems Ireland
mailto:calum.benson at sun.com            GNOME Desktop Team
http://blogs.sun.com/calum             +353 1 819 9771

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems