It has long annoyed me that I couldn’t attach a keyboard short cut to the Gnome panels “Run Application” dialog in Sawfish.
When people ask on the net about it, the answer is usually “Press Alt-F2”, but that only works in metacity, not in sawfish.
In earlier versions of Gnome there was a gnome-run program, but that has gone.
Then, on this blog, I found an explanation and a little program that opens the “Run Application” dialog. All that’s missing is to use add a Sawfish binding to the program, using the sawfish function run-shell-command.
Download a copy of gnome-run.c here. The program is a simple X11 program, compiled with:

gcc gnome-run.c -o gnome-run -L/usr/X11R6/lib -lX11

Looking at the program, I would expect to be able to do it directly from sawfish, but somehow it didn’t work. What I tried was this:

(send-client-message 'root (x-atom '_GNOME_PANEL_ACTION)
     [(x-atom '_GNOME_PANEL_ACTION_RUN_DIALOG) 0] 32)

but, alas, it didn’t work. Would have been neat, though 🙂