Re: Does GNOME Terminal need a UI update?

[Hashem Nasarat <hnasarat gmail com>]

Welcome Justine!

Thanks for your email and the thoughtful suggestions. Although I'm not
really involved in gnome-terminal (and thus not the best respondent),
I've a couple unordered thoughts:
- I agree with everything you said.
- Specific usability criticisms are best filed as bugs.
- GNOME devs and designers haven't really yet reached consensus on how
menus should be structured. As such, choosing this topic to wade in on
is probably more complicated (politically) than it would seem (technically).
- Since app maintainers have final say in what goes, it may be quickest
to just run the ideas by the maintainer (which I believe is chpe) in IRC.
- If I recall correctly chpe likes the menubar, but is open to
incremental changes (see https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=672433)

Regardless, a great first step is often to build, from source, the app
you're interested in. https://wiki.gnome.org/GnomeLove/BuildGnome is a
good tutorial.

Let me know how things go!

-Hashem


On 05/28/2015 05:52 PM, Justine O'Neil wrote:
> Hey all,
>
> I want to get my feet wet contributing to GNOME.
>
> One thing I have noticed is that the terminal app hasn't gotten the same
> UI attention as many other GNOME apps.  I personally turn off the menu
> bar so that it looks more like the other GNOME apps.  I don't miss it
> [the menu bar], in fact it looks strange to me now whenever I see it.
>
> Some of the functionality exposed in the menu bar is duplicated in the
> application menu.  Here is a non-exhaustive list:
>
> * "File/Open Terminal" is exposed in the app menu as "Open new terminal"
> * "Edit/Preferences" and exposes the same preference dialog as
> "Preferences" in the app menu
> * "File/New Profile" and "Edit/Profile Preferences" are exposed under
> Profile tab in the preferences dialog 
>
> Other functionality exposed in the menu bar might be exposed other ways.
>  For example, text size and terminal dimensions could be exposed in a
> popover menu like the icon size setting in Nautilus.
>
> There are a few challenges inherited from the use of control sequences
> in POSIX terminals.  Ctrl-Shift-C for copy and Ctrl-Shift-V for paste
> are non-obvious variants of the standard Ctrl-C/Ctrl-V motif.  The only
> way to learn these shortcuts is through the hint in the menu bar.
>
> Thoughts?  I would be willing to work on this.  I am good with C and I
> am learning Vala, which GNOME Terminal is written in.  I'm still
> learning GLib.  I'm not really a designer, but I know some basic
> principles and I have studied the HIG.
>
> Cheers!
> Justine
>
> P.S.  Since this is my first post to the list, I suppose I should give a
> little introduction. I am a 23 year-old young lady going to university
> to study science and computing.  I am getting my minor in computer
> science, but I have been programming on and off for the last decade.  I
> like to cook, and I love to argue passionately about things that matter
> to me.  And of course, I love FLOSS and GNOME!
>
>
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