I had just vnc'ed into my gnome desktop when I accidentally hit the / key. This may not be news to anyone but me, but I was surprised when an "open a path" window appeared. It had never occurred to me that this was a feature I was missing, but now that I found it, it's amazingly useful. I had been using the places menu to open up my file system.
As you'd expect, you can just continue typing a path like, "etc/init.d", and get an open file manager.
I know its simple, but it really makes my system more usable.
