An Updated MATE Desktop Wish List
While MATE evolves and matures with each release, my MATE Wish List has changed only a little.
General options:
- There is no launch feedback when using keyboard shortcuts to launch apps.
- There is a keyboard shortcut to Restart/Suspend/Halt, but not log out.
- Root account theme and color settings do not carry through pkexec/gksu usage.
A good way to resolve the log out keyboard shortcut is to merge the log out dialog into the shutdown dialog.
Missing panel menu options:
- No menu icon cache (resulting in a slow opening menu). Possibly fixed in recent versions of MATE.
- No Run option in the panel menu (the applet is panel-based).
- No Search box in the panel menu.
- The panel menu lacks descriptions.
- No panel menu option to launch the system monitor/task manager.
- No way to configure the menu button icon other than change themes.
A Run option directly in the menu is important to Windows converts. As most non technical users do not use keyboard shortcuts, the Alt+F2 keyboard shortcut is not easily discoverable, nor is the panel applet, which consumes space on the panel.
A search box is available in alternate menus. I think adding a search box to standard MATE menu should be configurable as an option with a simple GUI check box.
Missing terminal options:
- No optional persistent tab bar in terminal.
- No bookmarks option in the terminal menu bar.
- The terminal does not support monitoring silence/activity.
The lack of an optional persistent tab bar results in the terminal abruptly resizing to accommodate the tab bar when opening a second tabbed session.
Monitoring activity is useful with long-running jobs, such as compiling.
Missing Caja features:
- The context menu does not support directly editing *.desktop files as text files.
- The context menu does not support an Edit as Admin option.
- The Bookmarks menu does not support separators to improve readability.
- The Bookmarks menu does not support accelerator keys.
- The file tree panel does not remain expanded from session to session.
- Caja uses fixed column widths in list view.
The Caja fixed column widths is a nuisance, especially in small screens such as laptops.
I wish there was support for separators in the GTK bookmarks files. The Bookmarks shortcomings are due more to the gtk-bookmarks file format, but should be fixed nonetheless.
My work-around for context menu shortcomings is caja-actions. Unfortunately this extension is not available in all distros.
A long standing frustration is the GTK2 file picker dialog does not remember the width of the sidebar. This fixed width reduces readability. The GTK3 file picker dialog supports this (sidebar-width). I presume that merging such a snippet of code into GTK2 would be straightforward. Possibly this problem disappears when MATE fully migrates to GTK3.
Posted: Category: Usability Tagged: MATE
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