Ubuntu 12.04 review

Heads Up Display (HUD)

A lot of talk about Ubuntu 12.04 has been around the new HUD system, which is designed to be a replacement to standard menus. It’s designed to work like the Dash, only instead of searching for files, you search for commands in an application’s menu. You bring it up by hitting Alt to bring up the search bar.

The idea behind the HUD is that people often know which command they’re looking for, but they can’t remember exactly where in the menu system it is. So, if you were using the GIMP image editor you could open the HUD and type Dodge, then select the Dodge filter from the search results, rather than having to wade through lots of menus at the same time.

With the HUD you don’t have to hunt through menus any more, as you can just search for the option that you want.

It’s a neat idea and, when it works, it can make finding an option a lot easier and quicker. We also really like the way the HUD can interact with some background applications (it will normally only operate the active application). For example, you can change your online status in the chat application just by bringing up the HUD in any other application.

The HUD’s background interaction with some applications makes it easy to perform common tasks, such as changing your online status.

However, we don’t think that it’s quite there yet. For starters, it doesn’t support every application. For the HUD to be able to index a menu, the application has to support Unity menus, where they’re embedded in the status bar at the top of the screen. If an application has its own menus, embedded in a window, such as with Libre Office, HUD simply doesn’t work.

Even in the applications that it does work with, it can be a bit frustrating. Take Firefox, for example. If you’re trying to bookmark a page, typing ‘add bookmark’ brings up nothing, as the menu option is actually called ‘bookmark this page’.

That’s not to say that the HUD is useless, but more that it’s just an additional tool for some applications, rather than a complete menu replacement. We believe that in the coming months it will get better and better, both as its search is updated and as developers start to design their applications to work with it.

Fortunately, the HUD is currently only an optional method of interacting with applications, and the existing menus still exist, as do shortcut keys. If you want to navigate menus using the cursor keys, you can just press and hold the Alt key.