Have Fitts’s with your Linux GNOME Desktop

What would you say if I told you that with a few tweaks of your desktop and panels, you could improve your efficiency and productivity?  Just by adjusting the location of some of your widgets in your panels, and adjusting some of the key & mouse bindings in your configuration, you could get things done a little bit faster.  All you have to do is keep Fitts’s Law in mind.

What is Fitts’s Law?  It’s simple, really:

What?  You don’t speak math?  Let me explain it in English.  Fitts’s Law predicts the time it takes for a person to point at something.  It applies in real life, as in pointing with your finger, and it applies when you’re pointing at something with your mouse.  The variables that matter the most are the distance from the starting point, and the size of the object you’re pointing to.

In other words, you have an easier time clicking targets on your screen that are close to your mouse cursor than objects that are far away, and you have an easier time clicking on big objects than on small objects.  This is why we have right-click context menus – you right click, which itself is on a target at the location of your mouse cursor – really easy, and you get a menu that appears at the location of your mouse cursor, so you get a bunch of nice, close targets to select from that likely have a lot to do with what you’re doing at the moment.

If you want a more technical explanation of Fitts’s Law, there’s always Wikipedia: Fitts’s Law.

The Desktop Quick-Draw.

Here’s the thing you need to remember to have the fastest mouse in the West.  The corners and edges of the screen are magic places when it comes to Fitts’s Law.  The corners are especially magical.  This is because the edges are for all intents and purposes infinitely big targets for pointing in one dimension, while the corners are infinitely big in two dimensions.

Try an experiment really quick, and it doesn’t matter if you’re running GNOME or something else.  If you’re running Windows, you’ve got the Start menu in the lower left corner.  If you’re running GNOME, you’ve got the Applications/Places/System menubar in the upper left corner.  In KDE, you’ve got the corner K menu, and on the Mac, pull-down menus for applications are put on the top of the screen rather than on the top of the application window, and you also have the Dock on the bottom.

Too many people, when they use their corner menus, carefully move the mouse cursor to the corner and click.  I want you to throw caution to the wind.  Throw the mouse cursor to the corner as fast as possible without making an idiot of yourself and click.  Now you’ve learned the corner-menu fast-draw.  Now DRAW!

Setting up your panels

If you’re using other desktops, well, you already know the secret, so go out and optimize your desktop.  I’m here to talk about GNOME.  Why?  First, because GNOME is what I’m using at the moment.  Second, GNOME is particularly good at letting you use Fitts’s Law to your advantage.  For example, out of the box, it’s configured to let you use your corners and edges for useful things, and it’s easily configurable to expand on that.  Notice that in GNOME, when you maximize your window, and you have something like a web browser with a scroll bar, it moves the scroll bar all the way to the right edge.  Yep, you can throw your mouse to the edge and use your scroll bar.  KDE still doesn’t do that.  Shame on you, KDE!

Typically, one might choose either a single-panel approach or a double panel approach.  With the single panel approach, you have one panel at the bottom of the screen, with a corner menu at the lower left corner (I’m using Mint, and by default, it’s configured this way, with a Mint custom corner menu.)  One would also put in a window list, aka task bar, a system tray aka notification area, and maybe a few application launchers, a desktop switcher and maybe a clock.  The upper edge of the screen doesn’t get a heck of a lot of use, though if you maximize an application, you’ll find that you can throw your mouse to the upper right corner and hit the close button – some people might find that useful.  But I think that if the only thing that is on the top edge of your screen is a title bar, you’re wasting valuable real estate.

I personally go for the dual panel approach.

For one thing, I’m able to make use of both the top and bottom edges of the screen, and all my corners.  Second, there’s twice the amount of room for panel applets and such, and I make use of it.

Instead of the lower-left corner menu, I use the traditional GNOME menubar with Applications, Places and System.  It makes use of the corner and the top edge, which makes it fast to bring up those menus and use them to start a program, or log out or bring up one of my folders or files.  Down on the bottom, I put a Show Desktop button in the lower left so I have a super-fast way to knock my applications out of the way and get at my desktop.  The taskbar is down there too, making use of the entire lower edge of the screen with nice broad targets for each application I happen to be running.  Down on the lower right, I threw in some application launchers, with Firefox taking the choice corner spot, as a testament to my horrible web addiction.  Other than that, there’s nothing too remarkable – system tray and system monitor in my top panel, and a desktop switcher is the only other thing in my lower panel.

Configure Compiz while you’re here.

But what about the upper left corner, you say?  There’s just a clock up there, that’s not very useful to click on – you’re wasting a perfectly good corner!

Au contraire, I’m using that corner just fine, thank you.  What I’m doing is using Compiz, which enhances productivity on top of giving you lots of eye candy.  In particular, I’m using Compiz Fusion’s Scale plugin, which behaves like Mac OSX’s Exposé feature.  Make sure you have Compiz up and working, then go to System/Preferences/CompizConfig Settings Manager.  Scroll down to Window Management, make sure Scale is enabled using it’s checkbox, then click on it, go to Bindings, and make sure the Initiate Window Picker option with the monitor icon next to it is set to TopRight.  You’re all set.  Now, throw the mouse to the upper right corner, and the window picker activates, just like Exposé on the Mac.  Very handy when you have a whole bunch of windows open.

Final notes.

Now you’re ready.  Set up those dual panels, make sure you have all your corners doing something useful.  Use Compiz as well as the usual GNOME configuration tools – Compiz has some potent tools like Scale, and by all means, you should be using them.  Go attack your GNOME configurations, and you too can be the Fastest Mouse in the West.