No more right click terminal

Ben Steeves ben.steeves at gmail.com
Sat Jul 16 01:03:52 UTC 2005


On 7/15/05, Daniel Roesen <dr at cluenet.de> wrote:
> > If you wanted to start a shell as *efficiently* as possible, you
> > wouldn't use the GUI at all; you'd be working in a tty all day.
> 
> No. As I need to have several shells visible side-by-side all the time,
> and interact with Firefox and sometimes OpenOffice.

Sorry, but what does that have to do with using a key combination to
open a new shell?  Gnome-terminal has tabs, and if they don't float
your boat, windows.  Metacity takes great pains not to open
overlapping windows, too.
 
> > If you *had* to use the GUI for some other reason, the most efficient
> > way to open a shell would be by assigning a keyboard shortcut.
> 
> No, as that would conflict with the terminals, wouldn't it? So I would
> need to move the mouse out of the application/terminal windows to have
> the desktop getting input focus... OOPS, impossible with metacity! And

I really think you should try this before dismissing it.  I have a key
combination (alt-esc, in case you're wondering), that I use to open a
new terminal.  It works no matter what application has focus.
 
> Yes, but I need to grab the mouse anyway to position the new terminal
> window where I need it.

Ummm... no you don't.  Open the new shell (with a key combination),
then use alt-F7 to move the window (with the cursor keys).

 So my usual action to open a new terminal is
> to grab the mouse, right-click, move a few pixels to the very first
> option "Open Terminal", left-click, and then drag the window where it
> needs to be. Beat this. You can't.

My, how inefficient!  

> Now if metacity would actually pop the window ready-to-drag under the
> mouse pointer (drop where it should be by left-click... you know, all
> the stuff fvwm had many many years ago already), even that could be
> optimized, as no mouse movement to fetch the newly popped up window (in
> the left upper corner, where the average mouse movement necessariy is
> max) would be necessary anymore.

Yes, one *could* add all that cruft into metacity, or one could just
use fvwm instead.  Or one could use the keybindings that are defaulted
into GNOME.

> So opening a new terminal would be:
> 
> - right click
> - move mouse a millimeter
> - left click
> - move mouse to where the term/app should go
> - left click
> 
> => done. THAT is efficient. :-)

Ugh, no.  That's horribly inefficent.  Efficient is:

- alt+esc: open new terminal
- alt+F6: put metacity into "move window" mode
- use shift & cursor keys to put the term/app where it should go
- start using the term/app

Very efficient, and no need to take my hands off the keyboard!

-- 
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