Sweet Gnome Feature
2:05 am May 7th, 2008When I first started preferring Linux to Mac OS (which was my main OS for about six years before I started using Linux), my main motivation was tweaking the desktop — I started to hate the Dock’s lack of textual information, and I discovered that I could modify the look and feel of the fluxbox window manager to my tastes far more easily than any other desktop environment I’d used. That’s why it’s kind of ironic that I’m now using the less-customizable Gnome on all my installations (though I’m far from wedded to it — anyone with window manager recommendations, or tweaking-Gnome-a-bit-beyond-the-usual tutorials, please weigh in in the comments!).
There’s a lot of ease-of-use to like about Gnome, though. One thing I’m particularly psyched about is the keyboard shortcuts menu. Not only does it make it trivial to set up the function keys (volume control, play/pause, etc.) on my laptop to do what they look like they should do, but it’s customizable for far less obvious purposes. You can essentially assign any key combo or function key to any action. I already have my most commonly-used applications — the terminal and Firefox — as ready and obvious icons on the top panel, but who wants to use the mouse to go all the way up there? I have F2 open a new terminal and F3 open a new instance of Firefox. Every one of the several times a day I hit F2 to get a new terminal window, I smile a little thinking of the several seconds I’m saving.
And then I use those seconds to refresh LiveJournal. Every productive action has an unproductive reaction, I guess?
