2011/9/26 Mikkel Kamstrup Erlandsen <mikkel.kamst...@canonical.com> > On 09/22/2011 08:46 PM, Jo-Erlend Schinstad wrote: > >> Den 22. sep. 2011 20:40, skrev Alex Launi: >> >>> Can someone explain why we think we want the ability to run rm directly >>> from unity anyway? Is there a single person who wants this functionality who >>> doesn't have a terminal open all of the time anyway? >>> >> >> rm is a bad example. But being able to restart compiz using "compiz >> --replace" without opening a terminal and running "nohup compiz --replace" >> is a good reason to keep it around. Or to quickly open a root nautilus. >> (Which itself is an example of situations when it should not be necessary to >> run a command) Stuff like that. >> > > Just for historic reference: The Alt-F2 mode in Unity was added because > there was a *major* uproar from users that it was gone, when we transitioned > from the Gnome2 panel. So we added it back. > > Personally I don't get what people use it for instead of just having a full > featured terminal around, but apparently it is very important to a lot of > people. So I accept that :-) >
Having a way to enter one-off commands without opening a terminal is pretty useful. Maybe you wish to kill a misbehaving process or ping to see if your connection is working? Alt-F2, enter command, done. Why is that better than opening a brand new terminal? Because it avoids the need for window management or (heavens forbid) desktop management for an one-off command. Unfortunately, Alt-F2 is a little too underpowered as it cannot run commands in external terminals (e.g. if you ping, Alt-F2 creates an invisible zombie process). Gnome Do used to offer such a "run command in terminal" choice, which was very very useful. Myself, I have now moved to drop-down, quake-style terminals (like guake) which stand somewhere between Alt-F2 and full-fledged terminals in functionality. In fact, Alt-F2 is very close to a drop-down terminal in appearance - but sadly not in functionality. This is not a huge gap to close (just embed a terminal window under the Alt-F2 prompt!) but I somehow don't see that happening in the near future. :)
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