Isn’t the main point of the Run dialog to run programs that don’t have a menu entry? Replacing it with something that can run only programs that do have a menu entry would be kind of missing the point.

I NEED the ability to easily run commands on my system…

why not make the whole thing modular and customizable:
- which key comb brings it up (alt-f2 or something else)?
- whats the default action (search vs. run)?
- which key comb overrides the default (eg. ctrl-enter)?

thats how your really move conceptually forward and stand out from windows, os x, et al.

- the one who made the run dialog for gnome-shell :-)

Regards
Louis

What _I_ personally could live with is having it go like this
1. Type ‘esoteric command -number 1′
2. Options in menu to Search for ‘esoteric command -number 1′ and Run ‘esoteric command -number 1′ with default setting on Run
3. Enter starts that program.

But sometimes a change with no backwards compatibility is necessary, as it happened with KDE4 and with Python 3. It’s true that it is GNOME’s idea to do this change gradually (unlike KDE did, it doesn’t look like GNOME’s going to go and throw everything away at once), but this doesn’t mean that we have to limit ourselves to what we already have.

What would be the point of GNOME Shell if it was just redoing the same what we already have, with just a few more fancy graphics? The whole point behind it is to innovate and to try new concepts. They may be great, or they may utterly fail, but if we don’t even want to consider doing changes we will never find out.

I’m not saying all this to defend this particular idea of removing the “Run” dialogue as we know it, but because I want to ask y’all to be a bit more open-minded and carefully weight new proposals before rejecting them for “being different”. Perhaps at the end it will come out that this is a bad idea after all, but at least we will know why, and perhaps this will help us find new ideas on how to innovate the desktop.

I also want to thank you for your effusive feedback – keep those comments coming! :)

Here’s the problem:

He really had no access to a mouse. He was like “oh crap!” I told him to hit Alt+F2 and he was able to get to a terminal. He wanted multiple windows open, which is why he used X.

Keep the Run tool! I do use it from time to time, and in cases where I had no mouse but still wanted access to X, it’s so useful!

Apparently the first use case would be covered by the Search entry? So, about the second use case: I don’t really want to open a gnome-terminal just to run xmag or xterm or some command that’s in my ~/bin/ dir (like meld-old – meld without Git support) or xclock -update 1 -digital… If you find a better way to allow executing those commands without opening a terminal, I’m fine with such a change.

Also, it’s nice that currently I can use Alt+F2 under KDE and Gnome similarly. I think it would be useful if this still works in the new shell.

When are you folks going to learn that you need to STOP taking AWAY features? It’s really getting aggravating that we get used to something and then, for no good reason, you just decide to change it. I’m not interested in searching for an app when I KNOW EXACTLY WHAT COMMAND I want to run. ALT-F2 is FAST, CLEAN and EASY ON SCREEN REAL ESTATE.

On of the biggest problems with the Free and Open Source community is that they keep on deprecating features, or refusing to implement features, because a couple of yahoos think that NO ONE is interested in it. This even happens when time and again they get requests for a specific feature. (The Pidgin/Carrier Fork fiasco is a PERFECT example of this..)

Instead of concentrating on useless changes like this one, why don’t devs start working on ensuring that everything works on as much hardware as possible?

In gnome-do if you enter the command eg. e2fsck (chosen only because I know it’s not in my menu) it is recognized and the option to run it is provided. Your new shell could do the same thing I guess, although I would appreciate if the commands were searched when you start typing along with the menu entries etc. Currently in my version of gnome-do you have to type the full e2fsck.

Check out KRunner from Kde 4.2 eventually and learn from it.

Hope things will improve regarding the “Run…” // alt + F2 command