Power User Tools

This page is basically a set of links (and perhaps a bit of a planning/brainstorming page) about the Power User tools that can make GNOME better for people who aren't in our main target user group. Perfect example of a project for this list is nautilus-open-terminal, which replaces the now-removed 'open terminal' option in nautilus. The planning/brainstorming bit is on the off chance that someone would want to package these together as a project or whatever, and wants to move that forward.

Historical note: once upon a time this was referred to as the crackpipe, because it enabled you to smoke the crack.

Non-historical note: in general, this is a list of things that add /power user features/, as opposed to 'fixes bugs' or 'gnome should really have this feature for all users.'

Hack list

• Hack to add a new parent level link (e.g. to a custom folder or partition) in the sidebar tree of nautilus.

Configuration Tools

• Sabayon: a tool for creating, managing, and enforcing user settings.

• gTweakUI: A collection of simple dialogs as a front end to GConf that provide extra configuration settings for GNOME power users.

• GNOME Advanced Preferences: a little utility that helps tweaking some obscure GNOME settings.

• GNOME Color Chooser: a small utility that let the user override theme settings like colors, widget sizes, GTK+ engines, and its options

• Preferences Hide and Seek: Configure hard to find and hidden options of GNOME.

• GNOME Configurator: Edit advanced GNOME settings in an easy way. Currently has support for Metacity, Epiphany, Galeon, Panels, and Application Look and Feel.

• Ubuntu Tweak: A Gnome tweaking tool similar to the above. It's not Ubuntu specific, despite the name. There is a distro-agnostic version in the works called simply Tweak.

Administrator Tools

• Eiciel: a GNOME-based ACL editor, with integration into nautilus.

• GNOME Nettool: GUIs for common network tools like ping, whois, traceroute,dns lookup, netstat, etc.

• Evolution GConf Tools Python scripts that wraps Evolution's configuration information in the hope of automating mass deployments of Evolution.

Drop-in addons/plugins

• nautilus-open-terminal: replaces the old 'open terminal' in the right-click menu in nautilus with a more powerful/flexible one.

• Devil's Pie: allows users to create a set of rules that will be acted on if a new window matches a certain pattern, similar to Sawfish's old 'Matched Windows' feature. For example, I can make all windows created by X-Chat appear on all workspaces, and the main Gkrellm1 window does not appear in the pager or task list.

• Brightside: a tool to add reactivity to the corners and edges of your GNOME desktop, such as edge flipping and configurable actions.

• GNOME Launch Box: a quick application launcher. It's very influenced by Quicksilver for Mac OSX.

• wallpapoz: allows selection of different background per-workspace.

• Netspeed Applet: Monitors network devices and shows the traffic as bytes/s in the panel

• Deskbar Applet: searchbar in your panel, sort of like Google's Deskbar (for Windows only), but it can be configured for non-Google "search engines" like the Wikipedia, IMDB, Beagle/BEST, the local library catalogue, etc.

• Gnome Art and Gnome Splashscreen Manager Small Ruby applications that fetch artwork from http://art.gnome.org and allow easy installation of it.

• Gnome Art Next Generation Inofficial successor of the Gnome Art tool, written in C#, that aims to be faster and more flexible than the original program which is not maintained any longer

• nautilus-wallpaper: adds the ability to set your desktop wallpaper from the right-click menu in nautilus.

• Gnome Font Sampler: Gnome Font Sampler lets you browse your installed fonts using whatever color, size, attributes (Bold/Italics/Underline), and example text you like.

• Gnome Splash Properties: Let's you easily choose a different splash screen for your GNOME desktop.

• Superswitcher: an enhanced version of Alt-Tab and Ctrl-Alt-Left/Right window and workspace switching. Find-as-you-type windows, and also create and delete workspaces easily.

Changes that require patching or rebuilding of 'core' libraries/applications

• GTK+ file picker improvements: useful for apps that have not been ported to the new API, or if you are on an older distro.

Keyboard Shortcuts

An (IMHO) under-used current feature of GNOME is Desktop->Preferences->Keyboard Shortcuts. Bind Control-Alt-T to a terminal, since if you want to open a terminal, you're going to have to type something anyway (or else what did you want your terminal for!?), so you might as well launch it from the keyboard (rather than having to fumble for the mouse to click on a little launcher in the panel and then get back to the keyboard). Similarly, I have

• Control-Alt-M = evolution (M = mail)

• Control-Alt-W = abiword (W = word processor)

• Control-Alt-S = gnumeric (S = spreadsheet)

• Control-Alt-P = (On Ubuntu) gksudo /usr/sbin/synaptic (P = package manager)

• Control-Alt-F = your RSS reader of choice (F = feeds)

• Control-Alt-C = your chat/IRC client of choice

• Control-Alt-E = your text editor of choice

• Control-Alt-R = rhythmbox

• Control-Alt-L = log out (dialog)

• Control-Alt-H = home folder (i.e., nautilus ~)

• Control-Alt-Space = browser (Space = a big, fat, easy-to-hit button)

• Add your own suggestions!

You can also assign keyboard shortcuts to favorite URLs. For example,

• Control-Alt-G = gnome-open http://www.gmail.com/

• Control-Alt-N = gnome-open http://news.google.com/

Remember that, by default, Control-Alt-D is "Show/Hide Desktop".

For some of these, you may have to tinker with metacity's gconf settings rather than the Keyboard Shortcuts prefence dialog. The relevant keys live in /apps/metacity/global_key_bindings and /apps/metacity/keybinding_commands

FedericoMenaQuintero suggests a trick to add custom keybindings to the file chooser dialog.