If you’ve been following the development of Ubuntu’s Unity interface over the last few release cycles then chances are you’ve come across mention, in varying degrees of politeness, of Unity’s lack of ‘ALT+F2’ functionality.
When pressed together ‘Alt+F2’ launches a quick-run box from which commands can be run or applications launched. Nifty stuff that, sadly, wasn’t included by default in Ubuntu 10.10’s Unity interface.
To sate those users missing it we ran a list of our top 5 ALT+F2 replacements shortly after the release of Maverick. All of the applications mentioned in that article were certainly capable launch-box replacements, with most able to be shackled to traditional ‘ALT+F2’ call.
But nothing beats having it out of the box, right?
Ubuntu 11.04 has returned this sorely missed feature to Unity in some fancy new clothes, to boot: –
The best bit is that it works pretty much exactly like before. You press ALT+F2 and the command window appears. You enter commands, etc., and hit return to execute them.
Unity does give this rather non-sexy app a rather sexy new trick: a visual command history. Whilst the incumbent ALT+F2 allows you to navigate your recent command history using the ‘Down’ key, Unity displays your recent command history on screen.
To be all topical: #winning
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