[ale] POSSIBLE-SPAM-Re: ranting about new Ubuntu UI

[JD]

On 06/23/2011 07:22 AM, Richard Bronosky wrote:
> Again, I'm speaking without using it. Have they not implemented a
> shortcut for a quick search? Every app on my Mac is one key chord then a
> few characters away. Having a permanent icon for anything is kind of silly.
> 
> We have 3TB drives and hundreds of thousands of apps at our disposal.
> Traditional organization no longer applies and that its only going to
> get worse in the future.
> 
> It's not just people in third world countries that benefit from these
> new UIs. It's my children. They shouldn't be burdened with some 50 year
> old UI because it is what my Dad knew. Today's children are exposed to
> touch UIs first. They are going to have the same vitriol for the
> traditional UIs as what you are seeing here for the FIRST RELEASE of
> Unity. It will get better.
> 

I don't know of **any** X/Windows-based system that doesn't support
keymapping.  There are lots of ways to accomplish this and it is often
part of the Window Manager.  Unity supports it (somehow), openbox does
it this way. Here are my favorites:

<keybind key="C-A-t">  <!-- not all systems have a "windows" key -->
      <action name="execute">
        <command>xterm -sb -bg black -fg yellow</command>
      </action>
    </keybind>
    <keybind key="W-t">
      <action name="execute">
        <command>xterm -sb -bg black -fg yellow</command>
      </action>
    </keybind>
    <keybind key="W-1">
      <action name="execute">
        <command>firefox</command>
      </action>
    </keybind>
    <keybind key="W-2">
      <action name="execute">
        <command>thunderbird</command>
      </action>
    </keybind>
    <keybind key="W-3">
      <action name="execute">
        <command>keepassx</command>
      </action>
    </keybind>
    <keybind key="W-c">
      <action name="execute">
        <command>gcalctool</command>
      </action>
    </keybind>
    <keybind key="W-e">
      <action name="execute">
        <command>geany</command>
      </action>
    </keybind>


They fit inside a
<keyboard></keyboard>
stanza in the ~/.config/openbox/whatever file. For LXDE, that file is
~/.config/openbox/lxde-rc.xml.

Best of all, no desktop icons needed.  By adding my .vimrc, my system
feels like "my system."  That pesky Unity behavior of bring the already
running instance up when you want a new instance is fixed.

OTOH, I can agree that a nice GUI to setup keybindings would be nice for
noobs / anyone unwilling to edit a text file. I prefer editing a text
file myself, but I hate the Windows registry and miss the old ini files too.