alex diavatis | November 9, 2012

Gnome Shell messageTray: Add a notification focus keybinding

This post was made with another stylesheet and it might be messed up!

Gnome Shell is getting better and better by a new contributor, Stéphane Démurget. Stephane has made only 11 commits in Gnome Shell (in the last 4 days!) and every single commit makes Gnome better.

This time Stephane added a new keybinding (opens to <Super>+n, closes to <Esc>) to focus and expand the active notification (bug #652082). This feature is simple …but so cool that I screencasting it!

Open an active chat with <Super+n> without taking your hands from keyboard. Fast & simple!

Responding without using mouse!

Tip: You can open Message Tray with <Super+m>, navigate to items with arrows, open them with Enter or Space, close them with Esc. Message Tray doesn’t close with <Super+m>; this is a bug that it will be fixed in 3.8.

Note: You don’t need Empathy Window open to chat, this is just for the demonstration!

This article was posted in Software and tagged gnome-shell, notificat. Bookmark the permalink. Follow comments with the RSS feed for this post.Post a Comment or leave a trackback: Trackback URL.

Erik Blas

Very cool, (newb question) is this available in nightly builds?

alex285

There aren’t nightly builds. You can have an upstream gnome with jhbuild http://worldofgnome.org/my-experience-with-fedora-18-jhbuild/
Sriram Ramkrishna

Nightly builds is a problem. We need to address that. But we do not have the sysadmins to setup such a beast.

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1382120837 Michal Vašut

ehm, little bit of schizophrenia? why is necessary to have opened the messaging window when I write message in bottom-side applet (or what is this)?

alex285

Oops sorry, I think you have right, this video is a bit confusing. Empathy window is supposed to be another computer. I was trying to screencast a chat with my friend, but she was making fun on chat so I couldn’t really show what she was saying!

After 3-4 broken records I had to talk to chat with myself (!!). You don’t need Empathy to chat, sorry for that!

http://twitter.com/varemenos Adonis K (Vαяēмēиøš)

Imho, the notification system needs a complete rewrite.
This whole “x is ready” and the notification area visible only by going to overview mode or hovering at the bottom of the screen, is annoying the least.

Look at cinnamon’s way of fixing the problem. They removed the “is ready” message, they added a notification applet on the topbar, they removed the fancy but highly annoying “reply-notification” popups (that only work with few gnome-specific applications) and everything is simple, easy and most of all comfortable for the user.

alex285

Hello!
I see what you mean, that’s why I wrote that tip on the post. If you used to this and you have plenty of messages, I think is more convenient than what Cinnamon does. However that delay to open the tray with mouse plus the distance with Super+M is certainly annoying.

alex285

Oh but you surely can change Shortcuts, for example Super+M to Super+S

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