I know this is a controversial opinion, but I want to be one of the few to publicly announce that they love the window controls on the left side of the window. They’re so slick looking! It takes about 10 minutes to adjust to the change, but the beauty is worth it. A very small price to pay for a major improvement of the look and feel of the desktop.
Now, for those who don’t want to adjust (which is fine, really!) I have a prescription for what ails you. Yes, this is a shameless plug, no this is not snake oil. This is real jawn which will make your left-side-window-controlled hell-of-a-life into the garden of eden you never dreamed it could be. 40 virgins? No.. Jimmy Hendrix and Neil Peart (yeah, I know he’s not dead, just bear with me) jam sessions? No… This isn’t religion, magic, mysticism, mass hysteria, or Minnesota swap gas. This the Do window manager plugin.
And here’s a youtube version, if you’re not down with HTML5.
You can install it from apt://gnome-do and apt://gnome-do-plugins. Thw window manager plugin is enabled by default in Lucid (and maybe Karmic?)!
I suppose the fact that the close button is red does help mitigate confusion a little bit..
So if I switch the order of the main menu, the desktop will instantly become more beautiful? WTF the possition of the buttons have to do with the desktop being beautiful or not. With the same thinking, why don’t we swap and the OK, Cancel buttons to the left side of the window?
The important thing is user can’t get used to this weird order. Also users will often switch daily between OSs (and there are more Win users that Mac users) and will become confused with the different order between the two systems.
I’m not talking about the order of the buttons, just the left side of the window switch. Where the buttons are DO affect the appearance of the window.
“why don’t we swap and the OK, Cancel buttons to the left side of the window?”
Sure, let’s try it. Maybe it will be better, maybe it won’t. I have a feeling it’s been tried however.
It takes a heck of lot more time then just 10 minutes. I’ve been trying to get used to it for the past couple days and still can’t stand them.
So…change for changes sake is just silly.
You should try kupfer http://kaizer.se/wiki/kupfer/ awesome software that look like gnome-do but in python.
I’m one of the Do developers, I don’t think I’ll be switching to an uglier version of Do just because it’s in python
Pingback: Alex Launi: Anything but the buttons, or how I learned to stop clicking and love Do | TuxWire : The Linux Blog Aggregator
Curiously, the position may growing on me, too. (Except the order. That just has too many down sides).
Combined with the draggable menus, I can blindly click at the top right of a window and be able to drag it. No risk of hitting a button by accident, so the click area is much larger. Kind of Fitt’s-Law-ish
Probably other ways to get that feel without torturing users, though.
On a similar note, I don’t get a menu when I right click on a window. Do you know if that was intentional?!
As someone who loves to overthink things, I do wish the draggable menus thing was implemented by a 2000 line patch to rethink event handling so mouse events unhandled by a GTK widget travel up the chain in all cases and eventually land in Metacity (whether they be started from a menu, window background, toolbar or image), regardless of potential breakage that may ensue. However, this will do for now
Sorry, I always do this. I ramble in blog comments. Heh, nice gnome-do demo.
Or, install xmonad and forget about window decorations altogether
By the way, both videos don’t work in Chromium 5.0.x
The Youtube video is broken.
I love Gnome Do, and use it all the time for running stuff. Really, it’s great.
The one bag drawback is the lack of discoverability. I’ve got a number of Do plugins active, but I can never remember how to actually use most of them. The only way to find out is to search out the plugin in the Gnome Do website, and I always end up forgetting most of the commands soon after.
If you’ve got an idea on how this could be improved, I’d love to hear it
I preferred having the close button on one side and the other buttons on the other. It still didn’t help when two windows were side-to-side, since the close of one was near the minimize of the other, but that was still better.
I can’t help to notice that alt+tab is way faster to change the active window than what you’re doing.
Of course, switching to xmonad helped me get rid of the window buttons… but that’s not for everyone!
Still not faster or simpler than using the mouse. Take a look at this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-X9bcrJ3TjY for a real way on how windows should be managed using only the keyboard.
You must be joking. If it has not been disabled (which would be insane too) Alt+Space x etc. and Alt+Tab are way faster then bringing up Do and doing window management from there. Unless you have a real huge amount windows and make changes to unfocused windows a lot I guess…
Alt-tab has nothing to do with the moving of the window buttons. Alt-tab doesn’t maximize, minimize, restore, or close windows.
@Alex: And nowhere did I claim it does. But Alt+Space x, Alt+Space m, Alt+Space w and Alt+Space c (on a German system, but you’ll surely be able to find out what the keys on your system are) do in that order do exactly that, and are way faster in my experience.
Hey you’re right! Definitely faster, but mean memorizing more sets of keyboard shortcuts. Sometimes it’s nice to not have to think, and just act in a natural language fashion. If you know these already though, it’s probably super fast.
Once Ubuntu 10.04 Beta 1 comes out and sites review it the button layout will probably go back to the way it was. It all depends on whether the press likes the feature or not.
Yeh, mouse or alt+space are still a ton faster. Don’t get me wrong, I like Do, but this particular plugin is a solution looking for a problem.
The main problem with the buttons on the left is the proximity of the ‘window management’ menu with the ‘application’ menu. It is far to easy to close the application when trying to reach the ‘edit’ menu for the terminal in the video above for instance.