Hi,
I repost an issue that makes me feel the gnome desktop could improve in this aspect:
I'm used to the Alt-F2 "Run Application" shortcut for triggering the start of an application, but I find very annoying that it takes so long to show up (usually 3-4 seconds), because of the searching for available programs that allows for the autocompletion in the text field. Apparently, this searching process through the directories is very IO-bounded in terms of responsiveness.
I think this could be improved, by not generating the list of programs every time, as an option, so that the responsiveness is similar to the "Command line applet". In this tool, there is a history of the most used calls, so there is autocompletion for those, and it is ovbiously faster.
Maybe this is something that could be included in the "yet-another-option-bag" gconf, and edited via gconftool.
Any comments?
Albert.
there is a bug about this: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=133243
from that bug it seems that the speed of the alt-f2 could be improved with not looking thru all the files, but only the files which have a matching prefix/first-letter.
it's too bad there's no voting system in gnome-bugzilla, because imho this is soo bad...
for my personal use alt-f2 is unusable.
yes, the wait is 'only' 4-8seconds, and it does 'only' happen 2-3times every hour, but that's enough to make it's usage painful.
in contrast, for example kde's alt-f2 dialog does not do filename-completion..well, it does, but only a history based one.
but, it's FAST. and imho that's the primary use-case for alt-f2. it's for people who KNOW what they want to launch. if i want to look around, i start nautilus or browse the main gnome menu.
for now, i usually start a terminal with a keyboard shortcut, start the app i want to start (with &, so it detaches from the terminal). and close the terminal. it's MUCH faster than to use the alt-f2 dialog.
i really, really does not want to sound inpolite or ungrateful, but:
alt-f2 didn't always work like that. in earlier versions (gnome-2.2? gnome-2.4? i don't remember), it didn't do this statement completion.
then someone decided to improve it. he added this feature, but did not consider the impact of it. this was imho a bad move.
so, please: apply some of the patches/ideas from that bug and/or add a gconf-switch do disable statement-completion in alt-f2.
make it usable again ;)
gabor _______________________________________________ gnome-list mailing list gnome-list@xxxxxxxxx http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-list
