On 7/15/05, Daniel Roesen <dr(a)cluenet.de> wrote:
> If you wanted to start a shell as *efficiently* as possible,
you
> wouldn't use the GUI at all; you'd be working in a tty all day.
No. As I need to have several shells visible side-by-side all the time,
and interact with Firefox and sometimes OpenOffice.
Sorry, but what does that have to do with using a key combination to
open a new shell? Gnome-terminal has tabs, and if they don't float
your boat, windows. Metacity takes great pains not to open
overlapping windows, too.
> If you *had* to use the GUI for some other reason, the most
efficient
> way to open a shell would be by assigning a keyboard shortcut.
No, as that would conflict with the terminals, wouldn't it? So I would
need to move the mouse out of the application/terminal windows to have
the desktop getting input focus... OOPS, impossible with metacity! And
I really think you should try this before dismissing it. I have a key
combination (alt-esc, in case you're wondering), that I use to open a
new terminal. It works no matter what application has focus.
Yes, but I need to grab the mouse anyway to position the new
terminal
window where I need it.
Ummm... no you don't. Open the new shell (with a key combination),
then use alt-F7 to move the window (with the cursor keys).
So my usual action to open a new terminal is
to grab the mouse, right-click, move a few pixels to the very first
option "Open Terminal", left-click, and then drag the window where it
needs to be. Beat this. You can't.
My, how inefficient!
Now if metacity would actually pop the window ready-to-drag under
the
mouse pointer (drop where it should be by left-click... you know, all
the stuff fvwm had many many years ago already), even that could be
optimized, as no mouse movement to fetch the newly popped up window (in
the left upper corner, where the average mouse movement necessariy is
max) would be necessary anymore.
Yes, one *could* add all that cruft into metacity, or one could just
use fvwm instead. Or one could use the keybindings that are defaulted
into GNOME.
So opening a new terminal would be:
- right click
- move mouse a millimeter
- left click
- move mouse to where the term/app should go
- left click
=> done. THAT is efficient. :-)
Ugh, no. That's horribly inefficent. Efficient is:
- alt+esc: open new terminal
- alt+F6: put metacity into "move window" mode
- use shift & cursor keys to put the term/app where it should go
- start using the term/app
Very efficient, and no need to take my hands off the keyboard!
--
Ben Steeves _ bcs(a)metacon.ca
The ASCII ribbon campaign ( ) ben.steeves(a)gmail.com
against HTML e-mail X GPG ID: 0xB3EBF1D9
http://www.metacon.ca/bcs / \ Yahoo Messenger: ben_steeves