Dear Gnome-Shell-Developers, Please excuse the wall of text, but I am so happy with the Gnome-Shell that I want to give you some feedback. You find my feature request at the bottom of this mail, so you can easily skip the "spam".
First let me thank you for all the hard mindstorming and coding work you put into Gnome3. Using Gnome-Shell for a few weeks now I cannot wipe that smile from my face whenever I have to switch between running applications. Task bars always made me sick, with more than three or four applications running at once they always get overcrowded. All I could do to feel comfortable again then was to close some open windows, which on the other hand had serious drawbacks when returning to that particular task later. Now the task bar is gone and much better ways to switch between tasks are implemented. I really love to quickly switch between running applications by clicking on their highlighted icons in the dash. As soon as I have more windows around, Expose becomes handy and while I am working on the keyboard, your implementation of Alt-Tab also is just sugar sweet. Now with that workhorse of a desktop I don't feel overwhelmed by open applications anymore and therefore keep them open until I am finished. From some point of view, there is nothing revolutionary about Gnome-Shell and equivalents to most features were availiable before, it just feels seamless and intuitive now. As soon as I have to think about my next steps in desktop usage I get annyoyed and feel uncomfortable, because stuff like window management shouldn't take my attention away from the things I really want to do. With Gnome-Shell it is also the first time that I am able to benefit from using several workspaces. Starting applications on a new workspace by Middle Click proved to be very handy, I really love this feature and use it very often to get my task oriented workspaces settled. The workspace overview on the right of the Shell avoids the overwhelming disorientation I always faced when trying to get my work organized that way under Gnome2. Getting an overview when feeling lost is organic and intuitive now, you just begin with the same internalized first step it takes to start or switch applications or to search documents. Now I don't count mouse clicks or mouse movements and how much of them it takes to get me where I want. As long as the next step always feels organic and comes intuitively, it doesn't take my attention away from my work. Gnome3 is a huge improvement here and for me there is no more "panic" now, no more annoying thinking about how to get back into control, just pushing the mouse to the top left corner or hitting <Alt><F1> (unfortunately my keyboard lacks the Meta-Key) and I am on track, although I would love to have some way of keyboard navigation into the workspace overview as well. Maybe <Ctrl>>Alt><Left> to get from the window overview into the workspace overview would be a nice addition, as <Ctrl><Alt><Up/Down> already does the workspace switching nicely when on the keyboard. However as with the task bar before, better distinction and organization in Gnome3 made it possible for me to master the choas instead of restricting myself to one workspace with an overseeable amount of open windows and that is just a real desktop revolution for me. There is one serious problem I have with Gnome-Shell, using old-school desktop environments (I sometimes have to boot into Windows 7 for example) feels very uncomfortable now and I hope they catch up soon. ;) ---------------------- So here is my common workspace usage, my problem and what I would like to see implemented as a solution: I always have Firefox opened on workspace 1 and Evolution on workspace 2 and all other tasks get their windows opened on one of the following workspaces. If I close Firefox for some reason, it's workspace becomes empty and is removed, so Evolution is now on the first workpace, all other workspaces follow in row. Now if I want Firefox back, I can open it on workspace 1 side by side with Evolution or open it on a new workspace at the end of the workspaces in row. No matter what, from there on it becomes a painful drag and drop journey to get my old order back. What I would like to see is an (optional) feature or extension that allows me to open an application not on a new workspace at the end of all existing workspaces, but on a new workspace above the currently selected workspace. Best regards Martin _______________________________________________ gnome-shell-list mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-shell-list
