Please, please, please use the subject line.* It is a big help if people summarise what they are trying to say in the subject line. Better questions get a better response and people are more likely to put a little extra time and effort into their reply if the question is thoughtful and shows some effort has been made to answer their own question.
My response follows below, interspersed through your message. On Fri, 16 Sep 2005, Hynek Hanke wrote: > Date: Fri, 16 Sep 2005 02:07:01 +0200 > From: Hynek Hanke <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > To: [email protected] > Subject: [Usability] (no subject) > > > Hello all, > > for me, the classical ``background'' of my Gnome desktop (some inactive > image + a few icons on top of it) is something quite old and not really > working well in how I use computers today. In their present form , I > don't use desktop icons at all. But I have no idea about better > solutions for an ordinary user. > > However, what *I* would like to do, is to use the background as a > terminal. I know it is possibly to set just about anything as the background including screensavers or live video. As far as I know this approach would not be suitable for something interactive like a terminal. If you ask you local gurus (Linux user group) and people who are interested in tweaking and customising everything they might be able to give you more information about that approach. I expect what you seek is possible and in fact may already be possible but this list is probably not the best place to find specific answers about how to implement it. For what it is worth I dont use the desktop icons much either but I do have quite a lot of icons on my panel instead. I also have at least one terminal open** almost all the time which is a painful reminder of how I eventually gave in and learned how to use the command line. It serves as a constant reminder of all the things I cannot easily do using the Desktop Enviroment and there is a whole lot we can do to make things more user friendly. > That would really very much improve the Gnome usability for me (and > maybe that's the case of other power users too, I don't know). I keep > launching gnome-terminal all the time for every silly thing, that's > annoying. I mostly use the Run dialog for this sort of thing but I never did memorise the keybinding (I just know it isn't WindowsKey+R) you might like the mini commander Panel Applet. > And when I have it as a window, it gets in the way while doing > other things, so I shut it down again. Only to need to launch it again > in a while... I think we have serious problems if a user feels the need to resort to the command line on a regular basis. I firmly believe a Desktop has failed if you need to use the command line for ordinary use. I am willing to wait for the future when we can easily automate and script mundane tasks which I hope would exclude many of your problems. Things should be at least possible to do without the terminal and we can then gradually look at making them more efficient and finding ways to streamline the workflow. Perhaps you could give us an idea of which tasks you find yourself resorting to the command line for and perhaps we can identify ways to improve some of them to benefit all users? > Please, do you have any ideas how can I solve these three issues? Sorry I'm no use on the implementation but perhaps with my comment about running video or a screensaver as a background you will be able to more easily find relevant information. > I'm no experienced Gnome user, so excuse me if this sounds too dumb. I don't believe in it being dumb to ask questions and you did a good job of making it clear what you meant. > I could easily launch apps from command line, I think the minicommander panel applet might be a whole lot easier to meet this requirement > I could use gnome in the same powerful way as I use the console, no need > to use mouse or the not-so-easy-keyboard navigation when I don't want > to... i would love that :) I didn't really answer your question but I hope I have helped you get on the right track and I would appreciate if you could tell us a little more about the tasks you absolutely need the terminal for so that perhaps we could improve them in a more general way for people who would really prefer not to use the terminal (which would be me actually). Sincerely Alan Horkan Inkscape http://inkscape.org Abiword http://www.abisource.com Dia http://gnome.org/projects/dia/ Open Clip Art http://OpenClipArt.org Alan's Diary http://advogato.org/person/AlanHorkan/ * Okay so you apologised already but I typed it already and it does bother me a whole lot. ** Always having one terminal open used to be a failsafe so that if nothing else worked I could get to the terminal and do something about it. This happens rarely now but I do sometimes find my machine starved of resources if I open Gnome Help, OpenOffice, Mozilla, and the GIMP all at the same time. Stable OS is meaningless in this situation but I'm just bitching again 'cause I cannot afford modern hardware. Since I learned to use the command line I now prefer to use it if it will save me time or allow me to easily automate tedious and repetative tasks but I'd still prefer a point and click way to do everything. _______________________________________________ Usability mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/usability
