Make Dash home screen an external lens

[Mikkel Kamstrup Erlandsen]

There's lots of talk on the ayatana list about the Dash home screen being useless. Personally I never use it, nor have I seen anyone use it. In order to enable people to help us figure out alternative solutions I think it would be great to have the home screen be a good ol' out-of-process lens like the apps and files. This would allow people to experiment with new "home lenses".

What we'd need in order to pull this off:

 * Manage the global search across all lenses in this external home lens
 * Expose a renderer in libunity+unity with the required looks (do we need 2 rendering modes?)

Or the alternative:

 * Keep the home screen as it is, but allow a lens to "override" it by owning some special name on DBus

[manny (estelar57)]

Allowing to override (or quick pin) which lens the dash defaults to when it opens is very important not only to individuals, but to business or institutions.

[manny (estelar57)]

hmm, am not totally sure this is a full duplicate of bug #885738 ...

I think the idea here is that you would be able to "override" the old home lens and use another as primary, be it the music-lens, movie-lens, file-lens (for institutions?), the new dash multi-view or even use the stripped down "search-bar-lens" that Mark mentioned...