[549] in Athena User Interface
Re: Configuration of sawfish, panel, gnome-terminal, control-center
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Richard Tibbetts)
Fri Dec 29 11:54:02 2000
Message-Id: <200012291653.LAA24468@hikari-no-ken.mit.edu>
To: Greg Hudson <ghudson@MIT.EDU>
cc: aui@MIT.EDU, tibbetts@MIT.EDU
In-reply-to: Your message of "Fri, 29 Dec 2000 07:35:08 EST."
<200012291235.HAA06811@egyptian-gods.MIT.EDU>
Date: Fri, 29 Dec 2000 11:53:58 -0500
From: Richard Tibbetts <tibbetts@MIT.EDU>
On 12/29 Greg wrote:
> 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.
I had this vision to, and still think that it would be a great
goodness. I think that distributed management would make dash/panel
much better for users. If done correctly it would allow clueful TAs
and professors to make better use of Athena and make Athena less
marginalized. It also means that users are more likely to find
interesting software, because it is more likely to appear in the menu
other than as courseware.
This does not require the menugrovel machinery. It can be done by
offering distributed administration of some central location in afs.
However, because the locker abstraction is something we already want
users to understand, mapping the menu system over the locker
abstraction is superior.
This is probably too much change for 8.5. But I think that we should
keep it in mind. We should avoid doing anything that will ruin the
possibility of doing something like it in the future.
> 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.
Except that most users never find the xterm menu, and most find the
menu bar in gnome-terminal.
> 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.
You are expected to run background-capplet --<something> at startup,
which will frob your settings. Similar for the keyboard and mouse
setup and a few other things. Check out
/mit/aui/share/gnome/default.session to see what else gets run.
> 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.
MDI is Multi Document Interface. This is a term for what goes on when
an application like gnumeric can work on multiple documents
simultaneously. GNOME generalizes those, so that the user can select
from having multiple top level windows, having sub windows inside a
top level window (ala StarOffice) or having a tabbed notebook with a
document in each pane (as best I can tell, this was easy and they
wanted a third choice).
Known issue that the control center sucks.
tibbetts
-*- http://www.mit.edu/~tibbetts -*- finger tibbetts@monk.mit.edu -*-
