GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 131792
Remove "Open Terminal" from desktop context menu
Last modified: 2005-08-09 13:40:03 UTC
"Open Terminal" is not an action important enough to the average user to be placed in the desktop context menu. If the user needs a terminal so badly, he or she can drag an icon to the desktop from the System Tools menu, or add a launcher to his or her panel.
Amusingly ejchang found bug 41792, which is the request for adding this in the first place. :) Times have changed, though. Dave suggests that this could even be made an optional extension in the Brave Future. Marking high but it is totally puntable until the Brave Future arrives.
The correct solution to this is to allow the desktop context menu to be easily customised,not to make a blanket and wrong (no matter which way you decide) decision on whether users do or do not often open terminal windows. (I for one greatly appreciate the 'Open Terminal' entry but can see why some people would not want it there.
*** Bug 143172 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Note also bugs 114227, 91989. There is a lot of desire to keep this kind of functionality. It is all well and good to say that such options are confusing to grandma, but perhaps there should be an "expert" option for menus where most of the tools that are considered confusing are made visible? Turning on this "expert" mode should _not_ invlove grepping the source code to figure out the correct undocumented gconf setting.
Better yet, to have it as an extension, and exclude it from the default desktop by default. In fact, there's a Nautilus extension providing this functionality already (Debian Unstable: apt-get install nautilus-open-terminal).
* If someone wants to easily run a terminal, they should be smart enough to find it in the Applications menu and add a launcher to the panel, or create a keybinding to launch it. * If someone who wants to be able to easily run a terminal looks in the right-click menu and doesnt see it, they won't have any trouble finding a way to run a terminal. * If someone who knows nothing about terminals makes a slight right-clicking error, theyll be lost, confused and in a position to hurt themselves. I guess the end point is that the people who want this feature are smart enough to live happily without it. Besides which, frequently used as it may be by some people, "Open Terminal" is just an application launcher that has no place in the desktop context menu. If we keep it there we might as well add "Open Text Editor", "Open Web Browser" and "Open Mail Reader".
I proposed a patch in bug #154232 that adds a keybinding to open a terminal. With this keybinding, I think we could safely remove the "Open terminal" item from the context menu.
The patch for metacity has been accepted.
Also to note (for those watching this bug that liked this option) that it would be trivial for someone to write a nautilus extension (there already exists one written in python) to do a 'Open Terminal Here' menu entry that would actually open a terminal in whatever folder you're currently viewing.
Anyone working on this?
John: it's a pretty trivial patch, IIRC, and we did it for NLD, so it is probably in the NLD source rpms somewhere.
Created attachment 35379 [details] [review] remove the "New Terminal" patch Couldn't find it in the Novell src rpms. But even the UI guy can make this patch ;-)
This patch would "fix" bug 162424. ;-)
Note that there is related code to this xml file that might need to be removed as well not sure if the maintainers want to kill that code as well.
Please don't remove it. It is really nice to have it. This is the only thing I use in the desktop context menu.
removed
Yet another case of the Gnome team dumbing things down to the detriment of the power user. I use Right-Click->open terminal A LOT. Now it is gone, and there is no easy way to restore the old behavior given. Much talk is made about "making the Gnome UI easy" - well, damn it, you just made it harder! There are 5 places on the screen that are easy to get to - top, bottom, right, left, and RIGHT UNDER THE DAMN MOUSE POINTER. A right click to get to commonly used items, LIKE A TERMINAL, is the fastest, easiest way to get to commonly used things. At this rate, I am getting ready to drop Gnome for something else, something that does NOT insist that my environment must be "My First Computer by Nerf".
http://cvs.gnome.org/viewcvs/nautilus-open-terminal/
David, removing the entry made things harder for you, but it made things clearer and easier for at least 90% of users. Many things in UI are a tradeoff, and you don't have to like it, but maybe you can try to respect that it had to be done. I think most computer users don't even know what a terminal is or does, let alone need to use one.
/me would think that a power user, if not following Vidar's suggestions, would just bind the open-a-terminal keybinding to something simple and then use it--it's much faster than right clicking, moving the mouse down slightly, and then letting go. *shrug*
David: also see http://live.gnome.org/PowerUserTools which has hints like Elijah's suggestion to use a keybinding, and pointers to bits and pieces of random software that power users may find useful. (We need to find the right place to advertise that page...)