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Gnome: The Desktop

Gnome is desktop for Unix and GNU/Linux delivering a high level of usability and interoperability. The Gnome Foundation, initiated in August 2000, brought together many of the major Unix vendors, including Sun Microsystems, IBM, HP and Compaq, to support the further development of Gnome. Sun, for example, has identified the Gnome desktop as the standard for Solaris, one of the most popular commercial versions of Unix. Gnome, an abbreviation for the GNU Network Object Model Environment, is a component-based system built around standards such as XML and CORBA. It offers a standard for look-and-feel and provides a platform for applications to share resources (like including graphics generated using the Guppi application in a spreadsheet within Gnumeric).

While we refer to a common look-and-feel for Gnome there is much more. While all Gnome applications have the same look-and-feel, you can choose the look-and-feel (usually referred to as the theme) to suit your own style. The variety of different themes is extensive and includes themes that can make your desktop appear like MS-Windows or Apples Macintosh, to name just two. Once you choose a theme all of the Gnome applications will use that theme immediately. You can change themes (using the Toolbox) at any time. The theme used in this book is the Default theme that is similar to the HeliX theme but using a lighter grey in the background (and hence more suitable for the screen images used here)...........more

In this chapter we begin with the basics of the Gnome desktop and walk you though interacting with Gnome applications, including menus, toolbars and dialogs. This is followed by reference sections identifying Gnome applications.

37.1 Using Menus

Menus in Gnome applications work in much the same way as other applications. The left mouse button is used to select a menu. You can either click the mouse button on the menu or else hold the mouse button down over the menu. In both situations the menu will stay until you make a choice or else click somewhere else on the window.

Generally there are four types of menu items. The first have a right pointing arrow and lead to further sub-menus. The second type may have a small icon and some text followed by three dots. These items lead to dialogues that ask for further information. The third type also may have a small icon followed by some text but no dots. These items perform their action immediately on selection. Finally, some menu items represent options that can be turned on and off.

All Gnome applications have at least a File menu and a Help menu. The File menu contains at least an Exit with keyboard shortcut to Ctl+Q. The Help menu contains an About item which opens a dialogue that identifies the application, author, version and date.

37.1.1 Tear-Off Menus

Gnome applications have tearable menus. That's tearable menus, not terrible menus-menus that can be torn off and come up in a floating window of their own, and thus persist until you want to remove them. The menus that are tearable have an extra, and often overlooked, menu item: it is the first item in the menu and consists of a sequence of dashes. For example the figure on the right shows the bluefish HTML editor's File menu after it has been torn off. Tear-off menus are useful to access common menu functions quickly. The original menu is still accessible.

The menu can be removed by either selecting the first item again (the dashed menu item with the leading arrow) if it exists, or else simply by closing the window in the usual manner (usually the window's rightmost button). Such tear-off menus are useful but their state is not recorded by the system so that next time you start up an application for which you have torn-off menus this fact is lost and you will need to tear them off again.

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