Florian Müllner

Some of you may already know: it has been roughly a week since metacity/mutter switched to GSettings. The fallout has been quite small, so this seems like a good time to sum up the changes which may be of wider interest:

• no more hidden binding_name_list settings – while the System Settings panel still only allows to assign a single keybinding to each action, keybindings are always stored as lists, so it is possible to have multiple bindings per action
• no more custom keybindings in Metacity/Mutter – the Custom Shortcuts section in the Settings panel uses gnome-settings-daemon, there’s no point in having an additional hidden mechanism for the same functionality
• the keybindings to take screenshots have been moved to gnome-settings-daemon – those actions are not window manager related at all, they were provided by Metacity purely due to historic reasons; it is worth mentioning though, as the move breaks the shortcuts in the overview for the time being
• the keybinding to launch a terminal has been removed – I know some people will be pissed off by this, but well … you can define arbitrary keybindings in System Settings, there’s really no point in having a pre-defined (unset-by-default) shortcut for terminals (note how all other pre-defined launchers default to hardware keys found on some keyboards)
• GNOME Shell no longer overrides the theme preference – Metacity has defaulted to ‘Adwaita’ for quite some time, so there’s no good reason to keep a different preference for GNOME Shell; as a consequence, if you changed /desktop/shell/windows/theme, the change will not be migrated automatically – you’ll have to set org.gnome.desktop.wm.preferences theme manually (or just go with the great default theme!)
• the way Mutter handles keybindings has been mostly rewritten – the interesting part of this is that extensions may now use meta_display_add_keybinding() to define their own keybindings

So that’s it for today – if you encounter any issues not mentioned above, feel free to file bugs.

(Hopefully my next blog post will be a bit more interesting …)

Hi!

I’m Florian Müllner and I’m one of the hundreds who worked on GNOME 3 …

So the weeks of craziness have come to an end – the awesomeness of GNOME 3 is out and the time to celebrate has come.

It is a great achievement, and I am proud and happy to be a part of it and the community which made it happen.

If you have not tried it out yourself yet, do so now. Seriously.

Just be warned – once you’ve fallen for it, there’s no turning back. One of those little details will get at you, and you’ll live happily ever after. What will it be for you? The new System Settings? Streamlined Nautilus? Resident notifications? Chat integration? Topic-based help? The modern and polished theme?

All of those are awesome, but it’s actually a very tiny detail which does it for me:

Each time I find myself forced to use GNOME 2 now, I end up throwing the pointer to the upper left corner, followed by mild irritation and the feeling of something seriously missing. Muscle memory at its best …

Indeed, this is one of the many ways that we’ve made GNOME 3 better.

The relayout has landed, further development will happen on the master branch. All those who switched their build to the overview-relayout branch should update their .jhbuildrc-custom to revert to master.

Thanks for the patience everyone!

Yesterday I finally opened a Bugzilla bug to land the overview-relayout branch, so the review process has now started and hopefully the work will appear on master soon.

Most recent changes have been internal, but as seen above, the overall design has been tweaked a bit (not least thanks to Allan Day‘s input): the large black boxes around the currently selected view are gone, and the controls to add/remove workspaces have been moved to the screen edge (yup, the F–word!) and slide out on hover and during drags. Also the animation when entering or leaving the overview has been modified to only zoom the window previews — addressing a common complaint about the animation being visually expensive (well, or just “too much”), and resulting in the first bug filed explicitly against the overview-relayout branch — woops.

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Apart from those tweaks I managed to implement Dash DND, so it is now possible to add / reorder / remove favorites from the dash using DND. The implementation probably still will require some adjustments, but the first reactions have been quite positive, so you might want to give it a try; the impatient can add branches['gnome-shell'] = (None, 'overview-relayout') to their .jhbuildrc, otherwise stay tuned for those changes coming to a Shell near you soon …

I suppose by now most have seen the mockups Jon presented at GUADEC – a nice visual overhaul with the special jimmac touch^™. Just in case you don’t know what I’m talking about, this is the mockup:

Some of you know already that I am busy implementing those mockups – today I finally felt confident enough about it to show it off, so I pushed a public branch. Even though there’s still a lot of work to do (especially with regard to the new DND behavior), it is slowly getting there:

Obviously, the devil is in the detail – not to talk about some gross hacks used – so I wouldn’t expect the branch to land soonish. But there it is, for fellow hackers and ancious users to give it a try …