Contents
This page contains brief descriptions of many GNOME Shell features, such as keybindings, drag and drop capabilities, and special utilities. We are continuing to work on making all these features more discoverable, so this page can serve a dual purpose of describing these features to the early adopters and helping us keep track of the features that are not easily discoverable.
Many of the features relate to starting and switching between applications. Some of them are available in the current versions of GNOME and some are new. Other features are built-in utilities, such as a screencast recording tool and an integrated inspector tool and JavaScript console.
On the desktop
Alt+Tab switches between windows. The windows are grouped by application and the previews of the applications with multiple windows are available as you click through. The previews show up after a short delay, but you can get them immediately by clicking the down arrow key. You can move between the preview windows with the right and left arrow keys or with the mouse pointer. You can also use the keys wasd (for ↑←↓→ respectively) instead of the arrow keys for one-handed operation. Previews of applications with a single window are only available on mouse over. It is possible to switch to any window by moving to it with the mouse and clicking.
The applications running on other workspaces are displayed after a vertical separator. Including all applications in the Alt+Tab makes switching between tasks a single step process and provides the user with a full picture of what applications are running.
Alt+F2 allows entering a command to launch an application.
The panel
The panel has the Activities button for switching to the overview, the name of the focused application (which will provide the application menu in the future), the current date, the notification icons, and the button with the user name that activates the user menu. The date in the panel has a pop-down with the calendar available on click. The user menu has System Preferences, sidebar toggle, Log Out and Shut Down options. The sidebar is in the early development stage and should not be seen as something suitable for use in its current form.
Switching to and from the overview
Hot corner - moving the mouse pointer to the top left corner of the screen will take you to the overview or back to the desktop.
Activities button - clicking the Activities button which is in the top left corner of the screen will take you to the overview or back to the desktop.
System (Windows) key or Alt+F1 - these keys combinations will take you to the overview or back to the desktop.
In the overview
Applications area is where your favorite applications and your running applications are shown. The glow behind the application name indicates if the application is running. Multiple dots in the glow indicate that there are multiple windows of the application open. Two dots indicate two windows and three dots indicate three or more windows.
Clicking on the application icon will launch it if it is not running, and will open the last used window of that application if it is already running.
Right clicking on the application icon for a running application will bring all windows for that application forward and will display a menu with window titles for selecting one of the windows. This menu also provides options to open a new window for that application and to remove or add that application to favorites depending on its current status.
Running applications can be added to favorites with the help of the right click menu option. You can also drag an application from the application browsing pane (More) to the favorites row to make it a favorite application.
Dragging an application icon to a particular workspace will open a new window for that application on that workspace. Dragging an application icon to the Add Workspace button will open a new window for that application on a new workspace. Unlike launching by clicking which results in leaving the overview mode and switching to the application immediately, launching by dragging does not leave the overview mode.
Search box allows searching for application names or their descriptions. It also has sections for preferences applets and recent documents. The search box is focused on automatically when you are in the overview, so you can just start typing. You can navigate the search results with up and down arrows and hit Enter to launch them. You can drag the search results to the workspaces to launch them their without leaving the overview.
Clicking on the section header in search displays all the results for that section. You can go back by clicking the back button or Esc.
All open windows are shown on their corresponding workspaces. You can click on the window to switch to it and leave the overview. You can click on a workspace to switch to it an leave the overview. Switching to a workspace without selecting a specific window will just have the windows on it arranged the same way as when you last used that workspace.
Using a vertical scroll over a particular window zooms in on it by bringing it forward.
Windows can be dragged between workspaces or to the Add Workspace button to be moved to a new workspace.
Escaping
Hitting Esc key escapes:
- Alt+Tab
- Alt+F2
- overview
- search in the overview
- browsing in the overview
- Looking Glass
Screencast recording
Control+Shift+Alt+R keybinding starts and stops the recording. A red circle is displayed in the bottom right corner of the screen when the recording is in progress. After the recording is finished, a file named 'shell-%d%u-%c.ogg' is saved in the home directory. In the filename, %d is the date, %u is a string that makes the filename unique, and %c is a counter that is incremented each time a recording is made within a single gnome-shell session. (Note: Screencast recording does not work well with all drivers at the moment. In some cases, what gets recorded is corrupted.)
Developer tools
Looking Glass is GNOME Shell's integrated inspector tool and JavaScript console useful for debugging. It can be run by typing 'lg' in the Alt+F2 prompt. More details are here.
Typing 'r' or 'restart' in the Alt+F2 prompt will restart GNOME Shell. This is useful when you are make changes to the GNOME Shell code while working within the GNOME Shell. You don't need to compile anything if you only changed JavaScript code, but you need to run compilation as you would normally do for C code before restarting. 'r' and 'restart' commands work in the Alt+F2 prompt only when 'desktop/gnome/shell/developer_tools' GConf key is set to true.
Typing 'debugexit' in the Alt+F2 prompt will properly quit GNOME Shell. This will help avoid the problem of some applications crashing when stopping the shell using Ctrl-C.
