No more right click terminal

[Iago Rubio]

On Fri, 2005-07-22 at 17:52 +0200, Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
> Le vendredi 22 juillet 2005 à 11:23 -0400, Colin Walters a écrit :
> 
> > Going back to the original point of this thread, not having the terminal
> > in the right-click menu is not going to help these people at all if they
> > need some computer-savvy friend to introduce them and start writing
> > things for them.  Having it there by default is not going to magically
> > endow knowledge of data structures, scripting languages, variables, etc.
> 
> But the terminal menu entry will help the computer-savvy friend when he
> needs to describe over the telephone how to do something. It will help
> the people that formalise this kind of advice in howtos. It will help
> those of us who mail small scripts to friends because that's easier than
> take them through a computer 101 course (not taking into account that
> because we are friends or family we are supposed to take abuse pupils
> would never dare vent at a paid teacher). 

I disagree a bit with you here, as the "Applications" menu is always
visible in the panel, and to say over the phone "... click the menu item
at Applications/System Tools/Terminal ... " is not going to kill anyone.

Furthermore you'll be teaching this user where the system tools are
located, so he's learning the right way to do it, and not driving him to
think he should look for random menu entries at random menus to
accomplish a task.

>From the HIG: "The Applications menu, which appears on the panel at the
top of the screen by default, is the primary mechanism by which users
discover and run applications."
http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/hig/2.0/desktop-
integration.html#desktop-application-menu

I say a "random menu" here because from a usability point of view the
"Terminal" menu entry in the Desktop contextual menu is a mess - IMHO.

Contextual menus should have a meaning in a given context, as when you
right click in a block device icon and the menu shows a "Mount Volume"
entry. It's bound to the device and it's only applicable in this
context.

>From the HIG: "Popup menus provide shortcuts to those menu items that
are applicable only to the currently selected object."
http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/hig/2.0/menus-types.html#menu-
type-popup

The "Terminal" entry in the "Desktop" contextual menu, may drive a
clueless user to think the "Terminal" thing have something to do with
the Desktop - that's not true.

Even worst, this entry opens a shell cd-ing to $HOME and not to the
Desktop folder, so it's even more confusing. A user selecting a menu
item - on the desktop contextual menu - to open a Terminal window should
be moved to the Desktop folder not to $HOME.

With this in mind, I think that to drop this entry out of the Desktop
contextual menu is much better for clueless users.

For those with computer-savvy friends, they can always ask them to add a
little script to the $HOME/.gnome2/nautilus-scripts folder, with those
lines:

#!/bin/sh

filedir=$(echo $NAUTILUS_SCRIPT_CURRENT_URI|sed -e s#file://##)
selecteddir=$( echo "$NAUTILUS_SCRIPT_SELECTED_FILE_PATHS"|sed -e s#
$filedir/##)

for directory in $selecteddir; do
	eval "cd $filedir/$directory;gnome-terminal&"
done

This way - once this script is made executable - it will appear on the
desktop - and nautilus - contextual menus under the "Scripts" sub-menu,
labeled with the file's name - "Open_Terminal" may be a good name.

> Removing a facility to promote another (that is not even fully 
> existing yet) has never been a graceful or constructive way to
> change things.

Sure, but maintaining a wrong item in the Desktop menu because people is
used to it, is nor a graceful, neither a constructive way to improve the
desktop environment.

Users expect consistency among menu actions, and the contextual menu -
the "pop menu" - should trigger actions on the currently selected
object, and should not execute random commands - despite of the command
itself being really useful, or totally useless.

ITOH It's sure people used to this menu entry should be confused by the
lack of it, but the should be able to find the terminal entry on the
"Applications" menu. If they're unable to do it, they're learning the
wrong way to use the Gnome desktop, and it will be much better to show
them the basics of Gnome. 


Regards.
-- 
Iago Rubio <fedora at iagorubio.com>