Please bear with me as I am still figuring out how to use gnome-shell. My question concerns how to use the integrated chat correctly. I have the following questions:

1) When people chat with me, it pops up as a notification on the hidden bar at the bottom of the screen, and then that chat stays there so I can access it later. How do I initiate a chat in this manner, without opening an empathy window? What I have been doing is

• Hitting super key
• Typing in the person's name, which brings up contacts
• Initiate the chat using empathy
• Immediately close the chat window
• When the person responds, it comes through as a notification. I then proceed to interact with the chat this way.

2) What is the keyboard shortcut for bringing up the notifications bar? Ideally, I would like to have the following experience

• Use some keyboard shortcut to bring up notifications
• Begin typing the name of the notification that I wish to investigate, and have the matching work in a fuzzy manner, much like Ido mode's buffer switching matching in Emacs
• When then right name is matched, I hit enter and then bring up the chat with that person as that popup notification.

Are these behaviours supported? If not, I would be happy to work on implementing them. I am an experienced programmer, but not familiar with gnome-shell. If someone would point me in the right direction in terms of if this behaviour is supported, or where in the gnome-shell framework would I add to to get this behaviour, I would really appreciate it.

Thanks!