Re: Freature suggestion for gnome 2.0

[Telsa Gwynne <hobbit aloss ukuu org uk>]

On Mon, Aug 21, 2000 at 12:47:08PM -0700 or thereabouts, Gordon Messmer wrote:
> I don't know if this has been suggested before, or not.  I would really
> like to see a switch in the GNOME panel so that users can have the option
> of displaying the "Name" of items in the menu or the "Comment".
> 
> I think that such an option would be a great help to users new to the
> GNOME environment, who will not know that "Seahorse" can be used to
> encrypt files, or that "XMMS" can be used to play mp3's, or probably even
> that "Gnumeric" is a spreadsheet.  Tooltips are an option, sure, but that
> slows people down and is generally irritating (IMHO).
> 
> As GNOME is packaged now, some items in the menus describe the function of
> the application (e.g. Postscript file viewer) and some just the name of
> the application (e.g. gqview and dia).  For consistancies sake, I think it
> would be good for the Name field of an item contain the name of the
> application, and the Comment field describe the function.  Allow the users
> then, to display either the name or the comment in the GNOME program
> menus.
> 
> And, if I'm not stretching this too far, perhaps the comment field should
> be the default for new users of GNOME?

I like this. Something else I like very much I am going to rant 
about here, because I have run into this in different situations
several times over.

I have used UNIX for a good while, and I have not used MS Windows,
and it took me a _good_ few years to learn all the jokey puns and
silly commands. I kept typing "time" instead of "date", I didn't
get the jokes which made names like "yacc" funny (don't ask why I
even heard of it. I have no idea). After a while, I saw "less"
arrive instead of "more" and "pine" instead of "elm" (and goodness
knows how many other tree-names are used for MUAs now: I don't
believe many non-native speakers can possibly remember them by
"oh, what was it? That Australian tree... oh, Eucalyptus! Silly
me, of course!"). And this "biff" thing (biff beeped when mail
arrived, and long tales were told about whether it was really
named for any particular dog, or whether that was a shaggy dog..
er... story..) 

Once you know them, the jokes become quite funny. But they're
still completely mystifying half the time. 

And GNOME has decided to make things simpler. And one of the things
it's done is to have little menus with names and tooltips.

And of course, there are some programs you do not want to run by
accident, and should only run as root. And these only show up on
the menu when you run the whole of GNOME as root.

And then we say "Don't run the whole of GNOME just to run the IDE tool!
Or the updater! Or GnoRPM! Just start a terminal and su to root, and
run the command from there!"

I don't run GNOME as root because I am far too paranoid -- and prone
to typos -- but foraging around in the right directory (because, after 
some years, I have learned how to guess where things might be and waste
quarter of an hour looking for them) gives me a bunch of .desktop
files for things I gather root sees. Both the name on the menu and
the command that gets run. And well. 

Well, go on. Tell me how you guessed the command-line invocation of
"GNOME System Monitor"
"GNOME LinuxConf" 
"Disk Management"
"Change Password"
"RH Network Monitor"
"PPP dialup utility"

How did you get past the nice cheery names on the menu and discover
the actual commands to type at a blank root prompt?

There is absolutely no simple way to do this. Anyone suggesting
"look in $prefix/share/gnome/*/*.desktop" gets minus points. 
Doubly so because in many of those it's the wrong answer. In addition,
the menu-editor won't help you here... 

Anyway. I have half a solution:

I would very much like to see, either in the About box or by
right-clicking on the menu, "Run this from the command-line with..."
and "Part of package:" (another thing that's impossible to find
out until you have learnt far more than you actually wanted to know). 

It can't be hard to add something to gnome_about() or whatever it's
called, and it can't be that hard to have a "right-click on menu"
addition, surely?

But it's really not fair to say "run GNOME as a user and su to root
to run applications that require it" when they have completely
impossible-to-guess names. It would be helpful if we provided a
way for people to find out the names so they _could_ run them as root.

Telsa