What's New in GNOME 2 for Users

Lots of rumors have been going around that GNOME 2 won't have any new user-visible features, but while this was the plan and would have resulted in releasing sooner (cough), it's not really what happened. ;-) So here's some hype for you. I'll try to keep this page up to date, send me additions/fixes.

This document is as best I can manage about features that are already in the code or almost certainly will be, rather than hoped-for features. Still, some things may end up in 2.0.1/2.2/whatever, one can't say for sure. This list is totally unofficial/informal, which is why it's on my personal web site, and so don't take any of this too seriously. Also, I'm writing in January 2002, and the chances are that by February this will be outdated. </disclaimer>

GNOME 2 devel is tracked on the dotplan site (they also have screenshots there). I'm too lazy too make more screenshots but if people send me links to shots for the stuff mentioned here I'll add them.

This page is only about user features, there are far more new developer features, the porting guide covers a lot of those.

I listed the stuff you've probably heard already first, just so you have to keep reading to the end...

Improved fonts and graphics

• Fonts can be antialiased (or not, or only antialiased at certain sizes, or whatever you like).
• No flicker in GTK apps.
• Images are composited onto backgrounds with full alpha channel, accelerated via MMX and the RENDER extension.
• New enhanced icons from tigert and jimmac.
• New default theme.

Keyboard Navigation

Among the keynav features:

• Mnemonics (underlined letters, you press Alt+letter to activate a button or menu); now trivial for programmers to implement, used in many new dialogs, being added to ported dialogs.
• New tree widget supports jumping to rows by first letter, etc.
• Tab to move focus works more correctly and intuitively.
• Text entries select their contents on tab in.
• Key bindings generally consistent with Swing/Motif/Windows where common practice existed.
• Multiline text boxes have more powerful keybindings.
• Shift+F10 shortcut to open right-click popup menus.
• Various other small touches.

There are still dialogs and such in the alpha that don't have proper keynav support, and still some outstanding keynav patches to GTK, but quite good keynav support should be in for 2.0.

Internationalization

• the move to Unicode throughout, so you can mix multiple languages and scripts in the same document, and use funky symbols such as bullets and dingbats in a document.
• the ability to handle "hard" languages such as right-to-left languages and languages that have ligatures and reordering.

One major implication of Unicode is that the same code paths will now be used for European and Asian text, so GNOME will almost certainly work out-of-the-box for people in all countries.

User Interface Simplicity

Menu layout

Also, the menus are supposed to be more configurable with the new GNOME/KDE shared scheme for where they are stored.

Control center UI revamp

Panel preferences improvements

Style guide and UI project

New Help Browser

The super-simple interface also means that Yelp starts up quickly and doesn't use a lot of resources.

GConf Configuration, gconf-editor

There's also a tool called gconf-editor which can be used to browse and configure all the raw configuration keys that affect GNOME applications.

Accessibility

The core of accessibility support is a set of hooks in GTK that allow an external program to query applications about their GUI. For example, an external program can ask what buttons and menu items there are, their state, what their labels contain, and so on. This can be used by a screen reader to tell a blind user what's on the screen, for example.

An example of why this is interesting even if you don't have a disability: you could write a high-level scripting feature with commands such as "activate the File menu, choose Open, select all, copy" - no one's working on this yet so it won't be in GNOME 2, but a macro recorder and playback system would be a simple project using the GNOME 2 platform. This kind of scripting would use high-level user-comprehensible GUI features and wouldn't depend on special application support for scripting, it'd just work automatically with any GTK app.

Procman

Metatheme

Assorted GUI tweaks

• Menus scroll when they are too big
• File selector doesn't lose filenames on directory select (also to be backported to next GTK stable release)
• Trees and lists support clicking column headers to sort (could be done in GNOME 1.4 apps, but was hard to implement, so most apps didn't)
• Color selector revamp
• Right-click menus with cut/copy/paste in text fields
• Can drag windows between workspaces in the pager
• Menus do the thing where you can move diagonally into a submenu without popping down the submenu
• Labels can be selectable, so you can e.g. copy the text from an error dialog
• File selector has drag-and-drop support
• Configuration option to put scrollbar arrows in funky places (NeXT-style, windows style, and several other questionable styles)
• Themes can make buttons transparent or partially so (see this scary, scary example theme)
• ... there are hundreds of these, I can't remember everything. ;-)

Footnote on clipboard, cut-and-paste

gdm eye candy

GEGL Invaders

More!