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Gnome Pie

Gnome Pie, an application launcher with some really cool effects, has reached version 0.3. The new version brings a much requested feature: mouse bindings, so you can bind "pies" to any mouse button. To assign a mouse button to a pie, open the Gnome Pie settings and on the Pies tab, click on the "Command" field next to a pie, then click the mouse button you want to assign for that pie.

Note: Don't bind a "pie" to your left or right mouse buttons even if you activate "delayed bindings". There is a bug that will make left/right mouse click to stop working!


If you haven't seen Gnome Pie in action yet, check out THIS video.



Other changes in Gnome Pie 0.3:
  • Turbo bindings: you can select if the pie should automatically close when the hotkey is released. To activate it, double click on the key binding ("Command" column) and select "Turbo mode".
  • Delayed bindings: adds a delay before opening a "pie". This is useful if for instance you want to assign the left or right mouse buttons to a pie: if you enable delayed bindings, you can execute normal left/right mouse clicks, but if you hold it down for a while, a pie will open instead.
  • A new slice group which displays open windows
  • new elementary theme
  • less memory usage
  • bug fixes

Gnome pie elementary theme
New elementary theme


Also, starting with this version, the Gnome Pie PPA provides Ubuntu 12.04 Precise Pangolin packages too.


Gnome Pie


To use the new Window List slice, open the Gnome Pie settings and on the Pies tab, right click and select "Add new Pie". Then, assign a keyboard shortcut for the new pie (by clicking on the "Command" field). Now right click the newly created pie and select "Add new slice" and for the new slice, under "Action type" select "Slice group" and under "Command", select Window List.

This seems a bit hard to configure, but it actually only requires a few clicks. Simon says he'll implement a more intuitive configuration gui in the future so creating new pies should be a lot easier.


To install the latest Gnome Pie in Ubuntu, use the commands below:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:simonschneegans/testing
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install gnome-pie

If you're not using Ubuntu, get Gnome Pie via GitHub.


Thanks to Simon for the tip / info via simonschneegans.de