[548] in Athena User Interface
Configuration of sawfish, panel, gnome-terminal, control-center
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Greg Hudson)
Fri Dec 29 07:35:13 2000
Date: Fri, 29 Dec 2000 07:35:08 -0500
Message-Id: <200012291235.HAA06811@egyptian-gods.MIT.EDU>
From: Greg Hudson <ghudson@MIT.EDU>
To: aui@MIT.EDU
Here is a brain dump on gnome stuff from the release engineer's point
of view. Comments appreciated. For some of these issues, the aui
team hasn't really considered them to the best of my knowledge; for
others, they have and I've tried to address that.
gnome-core, control-center, and sawfish are integrated in the mainline
source tree and mostly building. (There are a few little problems to
work out with the wash. They all build fine on Linux.) What's left
for those components is mostly debugging and configuration.
sawfish
-------
Brad has done most of the difficult work here. sawfish configuration
breaks down into:
* Theme
Brad has made an athena-brushed-metal theme. I find it kind
of ugly, but it has the important advantage that it doesn't
use very many colors, which is important since we still have
8-bit displays to worry about. Another possible basis which
doesn't use many colors is the "helix" theme on
sawfish.themes.org, although I could certainly see another
person who thinks that helix is ugly and brushed-metal is
pretty.
I believe the chief theme modifications from brushed-metal
are: moving the close button over to the left (something wdc
advocated and has recently started to question; notably, it
is a divergence from MS Windows, although I think it's
consistent with MacOS), eliminating the window menu button,
and eliminating window shading.
* Site-defaults
This file controls all the things like click to focus,
special behavior for zwgc windows, and (I think) tooltip
behavior. Right now we have it set to do click-to-focus,
which is consistent with MS Windows but inconsistent with
our old behavior; I think we'll see if we can get away with
that.
I'm a little puzzled about tooltips. sawfish in the
windowmanagers locker displays lisp function names in the
right column of the tooltips, which is clearly wrong.
sawfish in the aui locker displays descriptions of what the
actions do in the right column; but I didn't catch anything
in the site-defaults file which made the difference. Both
versions of sawfish display lisp symbols in the left column
(e.g. "button3-click1"), which are fairly intuitive but
could probably be improved on.
* Menus (also determined by the site-defaults file)
Brad has done a little hacking on the sawfish menus, but I
think we want to take another look. For one thing, I'm not
convinced that the sawfish menus should contain yet another
short list of applications to launch (we can shoehorn "new
window" into the window operations menu to start
gnome-terminal); that's the role of the panel launchers.
panel (from gnome-core)
-----------------------
The panel properties live in the user's homedir. Once a default set
is copied in the first time the user runs panel, we have no further
control over those properties. So we need to be careful with those.
* Launchers
Since we won't be able to add, remove, or change the
properties of launchers for existing users, we need to
settle on a mostly unchangeable list of applications we will
have launchers for, and then make generic launchers so that
we can change what they do later. The applications I have
in mind are:
- Terminal
- Editor
- Mail reader
- Web browser
[ File manager? Perhaps having an icon for the user's
homedir will be enough. Not sure.]
To make these generic, the program these launchers will run
something like /usr/athena/libexec/athena-default-terminal,
which will be symlinks to the actual program (probably xmh
for the editor, for instance, unless we can qualify a better
one soon). The icons will also point to generic paths.
Although it's not necessary, I think we also want to shoot
for very generic-looking icons (a terminal, an envelope, not
sure about the editor and web browser). As usability
testing has determined, an icon that says "Evolution" or
"Nautilus" is meaningless to the novice user, so we should
avoid captioning icons with the names of the specific
programs being run.
Icons need to not use many colors. The aui team has known
about this for a while; I don't know what the current status
is on 8-bit-polite icons.
* Menus
We get a bit of a break on the menus. There are two kinds
of menus in gnome, "the main menu" and other menus which you
can point at a arbitrary directory for the menu. Our
default panel configuration will only have the first kind.
The main menu is composed of a hardcoded list of parts, each
of which can be turned on or off via the properties. The
first item, "Programs", points into the system area
/usr/athena/share/gnome/apps, which we can make a symlink
into /afs/athena.mit.edu/system/config for the f_l's to
control. Of the remaining options, we can turn most of them
off except for the "desktop" menu which provides lock-screen
and logout choices, and possibly "favorites" which the user
can easily add things to from the programs menu.
I think there is a confusing aspect of the main menu's
appearance, mainly that if you put the programs menu on the
main menu (instead of in a sub-menu), "Programs" appears
above the programs menu choices, and it doesn't look much
different from a regular menu item. Even putting it in
boldface would help, and that's probably a simple tweak. Or
we can just hack it out.
Brad had this vision of being able to add lockers to the
main menu, and to reorganize the dash menus along the lines
of generic lockers full of symlinks, which could be
maintained independently. I don't think we want that kind
of distributed maintenance for our main menu, and thus we
probably don't need the menugrovel et al machinery. I
understand the aui team has been working on reorganizing the
dash menus.
gnome-terminal (from gnome-core)
--------------------------------
Nothing much to say here, except that the default font is 20pt.. Now,
the default xterm font may be a bit small, but 20pt is extreme. We'll
have to change it to something a little smaller. The user interface
for changing the gnome-terminal font is unfriendly (because it
presents the user with X font names) and broken (when you browse
fonts, the gnome-terminal dialog sticks to the glass even when you
click on the font browsing window), but we probably won't do anything
about that. This is one area where xterm wins; a control-right click
in xterm gives you a nice friendly menu of fixed fonts.
control-center
--------------
When the user brings up "Global preferences", which is the control
center, they get a big list of configuration options. What we need to
do is make sure that they all actually work on Athena, and excise the
ones which don't. This shouldn't be a huge task; I can see more or
less what needs to go and what can stay.
One peculiar example: running panel does not appear to set the
background, but there is a "Background" capplet--and merely selecting
it sets the background. How does gnome normally set the background?
I don't know. Maybe in gnome-session.
And, heh, one egregious bit of user-unfriendliness: under "User
Interface", there is a capplet for "MDI". If you click on it, you get
a box titled "GNOME MDI Options" contaning choices for "Default MDI
Mode" and "MDI notebook tab position". Somewhere in there the user
might start wondering what MDI is; I sure haven't figured it out.
