Finder.py

What?

finder.py is a GNOME applet written in Python. It provides a Macintosh-like window menu for the GNOME panel. It is designed especially for use in a menu panel, but can be used in any panel. You must be running GNOME and a GNOME-compliant window manager.

There is also a version that does not require GNOME to be installed. It looks kind of dorky, but it works the same. It requires GTK+.

Why?

The taskbar is one of the worst UI features of Windows, but for some reason, it has been slavishly copied by the KDE and GNOME teams. It takes up tons of valuable screen real-estate, and forces you to hunt around across the entire width of your screen to find the program you are looking for.

finder.py takes up much less space on your screen than the GNOME taskbar, and doesn't make your lovely GNOME desktop so reminiscent of Windows.

There are a couple of other window-menu applets out there, but none of them were quite what I was looking for.

How?

finder.py is distributed as a tarred and feathered archive. There's only one file to the program itself, but it needs to install a Python module to help out.

Download

Download the package (.tar.gz). You must be able to compile Python extensions, and run Python GTK and GNOME programs.

Screenshot

No one will download any Free Software if the web page doesn't have a screenshot, so here it is: .

For installation instructions, read the INSTALL file. finder.py depends on stph, the Sawmill-inspired Taskbar and Pager Helper, which I did not write, but have included in this package for convenience sake. It also requires that you have pygtk and pygnome installed; these will usually be included in your GNOME distribution, most likely. To build stph, you will need python headers; in DeadRat and similar Linuxes, they're included in the python-devel package.

Contact?

Mail me if you have any problems or suggestions that aren't dealt with in the README file.

If you modify finder.py, please let me know; if you fix any bugs (or implement any non-obnoxious missing features), I'd like to include your changes.

If you will send me money or postcards, I will be grateful, but it's not strictly necessary.