Gnome: drag text to file

Got this one by accident. In Gnome, if you drag some text and drop it to desktop or nautilus, it creates a file with the dragged text in it. Simple, but might come handy sometimes..

Drag the text

After dropping, you land into file rename mode :)

GNOME auto-dim timeout

Since version 2.22.2 GNOME has introduced a new feature in power management - Autodimming the screen after some inactivity. Although this feature is direct copy from MacOSX, it's a really nice one. But the default timeout of 30 sec seems too short for most cases. I was wondering how to increase it and here's how:

1. Run gconf-editor. (Press Alt+F2 and enter 'gconf-editor')
2. Go to /apps/gnome-power-manager/backlight
3. Change the value of idle_dim_time. It's in seconds, 60 seems to be reasonable.

BTW, gconf-editor is like regedit in Windows. A lot of system tweakings can be done through this.

Getting out of Failsafe mode

Few days ago, for no implicit reason my GNOME installation refused to start. Failsafe mode worked but normal login would throw me back to login screen. Online forums recommended me to check my session scripts and all. But lazy me, i did the following in the terminal.

cp -r /etc/skel/* ~/

What i did was recovered the skel(eton) home folder files and it worked! I lost few settings related to Compiz but rest were all in place.

Compact GNOME buttons and menus

If you are GNOME user, you'd agree to me on the fact that GNOME buttons and menus take too much space. While this looks cleaner and spacey, some might feel this the waste of space. Atleast i do. So why not fix it?

1. Go to /usr/share/themes (or, /home/you/.themes
   
2. Find the folder of your current theme (eg, Human, Tango, etc)
3. Inside the folder, there's a folder called gtk-2.0 and inside it a file named gtkrc
4. Open gtkrc with your text editor (ofcourse, make a backup first)
5. Search for every xthickness and ythickness in the file and set the value to 1
6. Save the file and restart X

There's also a theme named 'Clearlooks Compact' having similar attributes. You can find it here.

Furthermore, if you need more space, you can turn off text display on icons.

1. System > Preferences > Appearance > Interface tab (or, System > Preferences > Interface)
2. Set the 'Toolbar button labels' to 'Icons only'