When I got this laptop, I decided to switch over to GNOME/sawfish as my
windowing environment. I had been using FVWM for the last 5 or 6
years, and TWM for the 5 or 6 years before that. (I still miss
InterpolateMenuColors.) But times change, so I
might as well keep up with them. Here are some random
observations on the switch; most of them probably won't be
useful to anybody else, but a few of them might be useful to
other people who are switching to GNOME. (By the way, I'm using
GNOME 1.4; I don't know what things discussed here would be
different in GNOME 2.0.)
Note: in key combinations, C- is control and
M- is meta (which is probably "Alt" on your
keyboard).
Workspaces are good! I'd had the capability to use them for a while, but I never had; now I've switched over to using multiple workspaces, and I'll never go back.
I think that, before, I hadn't learned the key combinations
to switch between them; I really don't like using mice too
much, and it's more work to switch between applications by
using your mouse to switch workspaces than it is to switch
between applications by just deiconifying them. But, with
my fingers trained by switching between text consoles, the
key bindings of C-M-FN are perfectly
natural. That, combined with using M-TAB to
switch between applications within a workspace, means that I
rarely have to touch my mouse when not using a web browser;
I certainly use it much less frequently than I did before
switching to GNOME. (Also, C-M-{up,down}-arrow
raise and lower windows.)
Getting applications to pop up in the right places takes some doing, but I'm getting used to it. The basic idea here is to get your applications located just as you'd like them, and then exit GNOME while telling it to save your session; GNOME will then try to put them back in their places the next time you restart it.
You can also order it directly to run applications every
time it starts up. Go to Start
Up/Preferences/Session/Session Properties & Startup
Programs, and click on the "Startup Programs" tab. This
allows you to enter commands to be run each time you start
up that won't be managed as part of your session. This is
particularly useful for programs that don't pop up a window
but just alter your environment (and then exit); I use it to
run xdvorak to remap my keyboard layout, and
xmodmap to fiddle with my modifier keys (I run
it on this file).
(Incidentally, if you want to make an application appear on
all workspaces, do M-right-button over it and
toggle "Sticky".)
Programs that don't know about GNOME aren't very good at
being session-managed. The easiest fix here is to switch to
GNOME-aware programs wherever possible. For example, I used
to use xterm (or maybe rxvt) as my
terminal program; now I use gnome-terminal
instead. (Yes, it looks crappy when you first run it. To
fix this, go to Settings/Preferences, and click on the
"Colors" tab; then set your Color scheme to "rxvt" and your
Fore/Background Color to "Black on white".) Similarly, I
use Galeon
instead of Mozilla.
But, of course, that isn't always an option; I'm certainly
not about to stop using XEmacs, for example.
These seem to behave best if you set their size/position via
the -geometry option, rather than relying on
the session management stuff to set their position. Also,
they aren't good at popping up on the correct workspace; but
you can move them between workspaces with
C-M-{left,right}-arrow, so it really only takes
a few seconds to get everything in the proper location.
I've only started to scratch the surface of what I can do with GNOME. I doubt I'll move over to primarily using Nautilus to get at files any time soon, for example, but I do like the way that it handles various file types (e.g. showing thumbnails of images when a directory contains JPEG files).
Last modified: Tue Jul 9 14:19:22 PDT 2002