How is the Unity Launcher like Gnome-Do on steroids? Maybe things have improved, but the Launcher of the Unity that's included in Ubuntu 10.10's repositories is really limited. It doesn't have any keyboard shortcut to load the launcher (at least as far as I can tell; it seems like super is the shortcut in current releases, but that does nothing for me in Unity 2.46), and opening things is _nowhere_ near as snappy as quickly typing "term" and then hitting enter, since it requires waiting a second to populate the list, and then you have to use the mouse to select the item.
I agree that it's a fraction of a second slower, as the box populates a bit slower than Gnome-Do. (Though I suspect that's just an area for optimization rather than an intent of the design.)
However, for frequently-used applications, you can also pin them to the launcher allowing you to launch them with one key combination. Super-1 will launch the first application penned to the launcher, Super-2 will launch the second, etc. In effect this gives you 10 'hotkey' slots for launching applications.
Good point. My gnome-do workflow is basically just typing in "chrome", "term", or "emacs" and hitting enter, and that could easily translate to hotkey slots. From what I recall of using unity in 10.10, it was difficult to open the same application in multiple workspaces, though; is that still the case?
In Natty typing 'term' and hitting enter seems to do exactly what you would want, except you have to wait a fraction of a second after typing to hit enter so that they can populate the list. Not as good as it could be, but tolerable for me.
interesting; I'll look forward to this when 11.04 leaves beta. though recently I've found that just auto-hiding the two default Gnome panels and calling up gnome-do to open applications works well with my workflow.
