In one of the strangest acts of delegation I’ve seen in GNOME to date, Jonathan asked me to publish a list of Cool GNOME Hacks, originally authored by a secret keiretsu of Ximian and Red Hat hackers — ten in all, the usual names — who met in Boston recently.
I get the distinct impression that I’ve been marked for secretarial work… Anyway, this is a righteous list — put your hack pants on and check it out!
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Add a preview widget to the file selector for the ‘Select a background’ option in the Terminal’s property page. Bonus points for other notable file selectors (hint: Desktop Background).
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After selecting files in Nautilus, and hitting the Run Dialog keyboard shortcut, bring up the Open With dialog.
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Let anything be deleted if dragged to the trash… Applets, toolbar icons, anything!
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Then create a Trash applet or figure out more clever scheme so that the trash is never obscured by windows (much like the Trash on the dock in OS X).
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Change the drag icons throughout GNOME to be the actual item being dragged, and leave a ghost behind. Starts with Nautilus, but could be extended elsewhere. (The HIG would need updating for this, too.)
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Transparent DnD cursor for item (needs GTK+ work).
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Update GTK+ drag icons. There are two patches sent to the list to update this — pick one.
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Create a per-panel “Configure Panel” dialog instead of menu.
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Remove gnome-panel-properties global dialog — all 3 options!
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Session Properties dialog clean up.
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Put current session information in gnome-system-monitor.
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Connect to server dialog cleanup.
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Per-directory view hidden-files support in Nautilus (see nautilus-list for recent posts about this).
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.hidden file support in gnome-vfs file chooser backend.
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Make sure that the file chooser is used everywhere.
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Sanitize volume control throughout GNOME.
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Drag sftp links to desktop and have them work!
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Clean up the launcher properties dialog in gnome-panel.
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Add a command line option to nautilus to bring up a folder with certain files selected.
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Quick launch dialog (like Launch Bar on OS X).
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Update location dialog in Nautilus to use GtkEntryCompletion.
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Move ‘Connect to Server’ to the “actions” menu.
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Change the default background image.
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Modify the Background, Font, and Theme dialogs all to have a similar look’n'feel.
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Get one of the Menu stripe patches (from Sun, Ximian and maybe others) into gnome-panel, but turn it off by default.
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Either kill the shell in gnome-control-center, or take the Ximian one and fix it. Either way, the preferences:/// uri in nautilus has to go.
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Go on a frame shadow fixing streak through GNOME. The obvious offender is the ‘find file’ dialog, but there are more.
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Logout dialog needs cleaning up. People have been interested in binding it to C-A-Delete. Additionally, looking into user-switching would be good. (Ed: James Cape is hacking on this.)
