Allow customisation of categories in the activity overview

[Wise Melon]

The categories such as Sundry and Utilities in the AO's are quite useful, however what would be far more useful is if it was possible and easy to create, rename and delete categories listed there as well as to customise which applications are in them. Perhaps there could be right-click options to do this in the AO? Or settings elsewhere?

[Egeorget (egeorget)]

Hi

As an user, I would really like to be able to more easily make application folders from the overview. My idea, would be to automatically creating them by drag and drop, if the app is dropped on top of another app, or add the dropped app to a folder if it is dropped on it..

This could have some advantages:

1 - It would make it more easy for the user to sort his apps (for example, by putting all his games in a folder)
2 - The user would be able to more easily find his app, especially if this app don't provide keyword (it happen), and/or that he don't know the name anymore.

As I'm not a designer, I don't know how to make a draft, but if you have question on my idea, feel free to ask.

[Florian-muellner (florian-muellner)]

(In reply to Erwan Georget from comment #0)
> As an user, I would really like to be able to more easily make application
> folders from the overview. My idea, would be to automatically creating them
> by drag and drop, if the app is dropped on top of another app, or add the
> dropped app to a folder if it is dropped on it..

This has been discussed several times before - the main issue is that drag-and-drop is awkward with pagination (and in particular when taking multiple monitors into account).

[Egeorget (egeorget)]

In what ways?

[Florian-muellner (florian-muellner)]

*** Bug 767041 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

[Lmello-009 (lmello-009)]

(In reply to Florian Müllner from comment #1)
> (In reply to Erwan Georget from comment #0)
> > As an user, I would really like to be able to more easily make application
> > folders from the overview. My idea, would be to automatically creating them
> > by drag and drop, if the app is dropped on top of another app, or add the
> > dropped app to a folder if it is dropped on it..
>
> This has been discussed several times before - the main issue is that
> drag-and-drop is awkward with pagination (and in particular when taking
> multiple monitors into account).

Perhaps a right-click action could work. You can right-click on a application icon and select "Add to favorites"... is an "Add to folder" option viable?

[Florian-muellner (florian-muellner)]

(In reply to Luis Henrique Mello from comment #4)
> Perhaps a right-click action could work. You can right-click on a
> application icon and select "Add to favorites"... is an "Add to folder"
> option viable?

Mmh, I'd say it depends - if gnome-software gives us a way to leverage the existing UI for that (like it does for the "Show Details" item), this would be very viable. I wouldn't want to reimplement the exact same UI in the shell (using a different toolkit and the constraint that we cannot use actual windows ...)

[Generalsnus (generalsnus)]

I cannot believe this was never implemented in Gnome 3.x. If I have 200 programs installed I could create and manage a folder structure to quickly locate any program in the app menu. For some reason Gnome decided to implement a search box to find programs.

1) The overview screen/start menu in Gnome was clearly inspired for a touch interface (touch never got popular, btw.) In a touch interface you don't want to click a menu button and then to open a program you have to type out its name. How about click, click folder, click icon, done. Not click, type type type type type type type, click icon, done.

2) A search bar to find applications would mean a new user would have to know every name of every program on their computer. If, hypothetically, a user came from Windows, they'd search for notepad or Word, not Gedit nor LibreOffice Writer. I assume to alleviate this in a search bar you would implement a tagging system where familiar apps could have alias names (Word and notepad would find every document processor tagged with that alias.) So now we have introduced more complexity simply to make an app search usable.

3) If you have 200 programs installed on your computer, scrolling to find a program is not ideal.

4) Muscle memory. When I know where my apps are I do not have to think about how it's spelled.

5) Accessibility. If all of my programming apps are under a programming folder I create, I can easily find all of my programming apps.

6) Corporate deployments. If I deployed Gnome on 1000 computers and expected users to find apps, it would be nice to organize the applications in a structured Office Suite/Accessories/Programming/Internet/AudioVisual application folder structure versus telling them they will have to open each application to see what it does until you memorize the program names to search for them.

As for multi-monitor support, that's literally a fringe number of users. Heck, only Gnome developers and a few gamers would actually have multi-monitors. Most users are on laptops.

As much as I don't like Gnome's current application launching structure it does look pretty. It's just not very usable for muscle memory, a standard workstation image for new users, nor for introducing new users to Linux.

[Florian-muellner (florian-muellner)]

Please, don't add any possible keywords to a bug, just to raise attention for something you are passionate about.

(For instance "newcomers" means: this bug is suitable for someone who never worked on gnome-shell before. This bug clearly does *not* meet that)

[Florian-muellner (florian-muellner)]

*** Bug 781176 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

[Daniel van Vugt (vanvugt)]

Close this? The feature seems to exist now.

[Daniel van Vugt (vanvugt)]

The latest Ubuntu releases now have this feature.