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<font face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif">Hi!<br>
<br>
I am a first year undergraduate student at the university
interested in contributing to KDE for the 2016 edition for the
GSoC.<br>
<br>
I wish to contribute with an original idea. A short summary of my
idea is as follows:</font><br>
<h1 id="firstHeading"><small><small><small><font face="Helvetica,
Arial, sans-serif">File Trays for making file selection
easier in Dolphin</font></small> </small></small></h1>
<p><font face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif">Selecting multiple
files in any file manager for copying and pasting has never been
a pleasant experience, especially if the files are in a
non-continuous order. Often, when selecting files using Ctrl+A
or the selection tool, we find that we need to select only a
subset of the required files we have selected. This leads to the
unwieldy operation of removing files from our selection. Of
course, the common workaround is to create a new folder and to
put all the items in this folder prior to copying, but this is a
very inefficient and very slow process if large files need to be
copied. Moreover, the use of Ctrl+Click to select files is not a
user-friendly operation - it requires fine motor control to not
accidentally release the Ctrl key which will cause one to lose
the entire selection of files.
</font></p>
<p><font face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif">My solution to this
problem is to add a Places option in Dolphin where the links to
files and folders can be temporarily saved for a session. The
files and folders are "staged" on this panel. Files can be added
to this tray by using a right-click context menu option, using
the mouse scroll click, or drag and drop. As an additional
option, the session for the File Tray Panel can be saved for
later use. Hence, complex file operations such as moving files
across many devices can be made easy by staging the operation
before performing it.<br>
</font></p>
<p><font face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif">Therefore, the user can
add folders and files from several different directories to this
panel and can then collectively perform actions on all the items
in the tray such as copy, paste, cut, delete, send via
Bluetooth, create a list of symbolic links, etc. I also plan to
integrate the KDE Purpose Framework API in Dolphin to improve
the sharing options of the application as a whole.
</font></p>
<font face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif">The complete details of
the project, including usecases, implementation details, features,
and more can be found here: <a href="https://goo.gl/XeszhC">https://goo.gl/XeszhC</a><br>
<br>
As far as implementation of the project goes, I intend to use a<b>
KIO Slave</b> for having a virtual directory storing the URLs to
added files added in the File Tray. It will accessible by KDE
applications working similarly to how bluetooth:/, trash:/,
fish:/, etc. work. However, complete documentation on writing KIO
Slaves is hard to find, so I want the opinion of this mailing list
on whether a KIO Slave is the best approach to this project. The
view displaying the File Tray also requires some context menu
actions specific to it. <br>
<br>
This project will later be expanded to include a Plasmoid for the
KDE desktop, so I feel KIO Slaves would make this much easier to
implement. I would love to hear the opinions of KDE developers on
this matter.<br>
</font>
<div class="moz-signature">-- <br>
<font face="arial">arnav dhamija</font></div>
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