Idea, expanding from the Workspaces and Applications menus to the “WARP” array

[eekleefeld]

The gears in my head started turning when I installed the commonly used GNOME extension, Places Status Indicator, and found that it could fill out some of the empty space in the top panel. (Then I realized that when added right after the Workspaces and Applications menus, they spelled out a somewhat vulgar acronym.)

It occurred to me that something else could be added to the space, a “Recents” menu. When placed in between Applications and Places, the whole thing would then spell out “WARP,” pairing up nicely with the COSMIC themes of space exploration. Beyond just a catchy name, this could provide a full range of user functionality without having to navigate submenus or switch your focus out from a current application.

Here’s what I have so far. Admittedly, I am not any kind of programmer, so I would not know how to rig up the final product myself.

There is currently a Recent Items extension out there, but it places itself as a status icon over on the right side of the screen as shown above. So, this could be implemented in the current GNOME-based environment in the LTS release. All it would take is to copy all the functionality code, and then fork it over so that it becomes the spelled out word and placed on the left side of the top panel, and to make sure it comes right before Places.

[jacobgkau]

It's a creative acronym idea, but we don't want to make UX decisions based on acronyms-- the functionality needs to make sense. It looks like Places just shows something similar to the left sidebar in Nautilus, and Recents shows something similar to the Nautilus Recents page (possibly a similar data source to what shows up in the Pop Shell launcher's recent ___ query.) These make a lot of sense to have as extensions, but carrying them as officially supported and having them enabled by default may not be desired.

(Also, I'm not on the UX team, but my first instinct would be wanting the "Recents" item at the end of the list, after "Places," since it would be the most volatile menu. And with 4 entries instead of 2, cases for being able to customize the order could be made, opening up another can of worms. So further decisions would need to be made.)

For the record, "warp" is already utilized within Pop!_OS as the name of the amd64 package building server (you can see it in the output of sudo dmesg | head if you're using the default kernel on an x86-64 machine.)

[eekleefeld]

Thanks for getting back to me. I very much appreciate a response from somebody at System76, and have taken a few days to think over my responses.

I will argue that the functionality makes real sense, and does something beyond just duplicating features from Nautilus. Instead, it provides a shortcut to those functionalities without the user having to step back from their current task.

Let’s look at each one, and start with what the user has to do under the current system.

In the case of what the Recents menu does, a user has two options without it:

1. Type “recent” in the launcher, followed by some other keyword to then find the right file
2. Go into Nautilus, and browse through the Recents sidebar there, thus switching the mental focus out of whatever task they were doing at the time. (They might be trying to simply bring up a recent file in order to assist in a current task.)

With a Recents menu, using the same data source as what Nautilus is accessing, the file listing is just a click away at any time, and no matter what application the user is currently working on.

As for the Places menu, which accesses the same source as the Nautilus sidebar, as things are a user has to bring up a Nautilus window and then click into the desired folder in the sidebar. The user can skip a step using the Places pulldown menu, by opening up a Nautilus window directly into the desired folder Then they might call up whatever file they needed, and close the window behind them. (The Places menu also has a secondary task, of ejecting mounted volumes without even having to go into a Nautilus window, in addition to being able to open those volumes directly.)

The Recents and Places functions also fit in naturally on the left side of the top panel, with the Workspaces and Applications menus. They all serve the purpose of launching the user’s main tasks — particularly via a mouse/touchpad interface, in contrast to the keyboard methods that the system provides — and are also distinct from the status indicators on the right side.

In addition, bringing these functions right into the top panel is similar to how COSMIC improved on the stock GNOME experience by placing the Applications menu just one click away, instead of having to hunt through the vanilla Activities overview. This is just a logical next step.

Here’s a mock-up I’ve created in GIMP, to show what it would look like. The “WARP” mnemonic can combine genuine functionality and playful novelty at once, a neat trick whenever it’s possible to do that.

Anyway, thanks for your time.

[ids1024]

The "Places" menu is actually a thing that used to be standard on Gnome 2, for anyone who doesn't know.

The usefulness of a "Recents" menu may be limited by what information is available to it. (It may not know that a file was used recently depending on how it was opened, in what software.)