Ubuntu 11.04 and Unity

[Jarod Wilson]

On May 10, 2011, at 1:41 PM, Matthew Gillen wrote:

> On 05/10/2011 11:17 AM, Jarod Wilson wrote:
>> Another pro to consider: menus aren't duplicated needlessly
>> across multiple instances of the same program. Part of this has
>> to do with how processes are launch in, say, gnome, vs. in Mac
>> OS X. Two gnome terminal windows == two different applications,
>> each with its own menu[*]. Two Terminal terminal windows on OS X
>> is two windows of the same application. One menu bar instead of
>> two. Now add a bunch more terminal windows and consider which
>> one makes better use of screen real estate.
> 
> That would be more compelling if the major terminal programs
> (gnome-terminal, konsole) hadn't taken a tip from Powershell and started
> supporting tabbed instances.  I only ever start one instance of
> gnome-terminal, then ctrl-shift-t until have my workspace.

Tabs don't solve the problem very well if you want to see more
than one window for a given application.


> Or just turn
> off the menu bar (since I never use it on terminals anyway).

Yeah, I typically have at least three terminal windows open, no
menu bar, and several tabs in each of the terminal windows. No
menu bar isn't a default though, and I'm not sure that even being
able to turn off the menu bar is an option in many applications,
at least, not without significant hackage.


>> Regardless of desktop OS and menu location, keyboard shortcuts and
>> contextual menus ftw. At least in my case, I rarely ever have to
>> go to the menu bar on any OS.
> 
> Whole-heartedly agree for terminal-like applications.  Some apps (gimp?)
> lend themselves to much heavier menu use.  Maybe I'm just not very
> proficient in gimp, but I imagine it (or any other full-featured
> image-manipulation program) would be a PITA to use with MacOS-style menus...

I have very little gimp experience to go on, but tons of Photoshop
users (myself included, ~15 years ago) didn't really seem to have
a problem with it for all those years when most of them ran on a
Mac... But then a lot of the functionality is in (or duplicated in)
menus in the various palette thingies, making the menu bar location
mostly moot.


-- 
Jarod Wilson
jarod-ajLrJawYSntWk0Htik3J/w at public.gmane.org