Integration of virtual folders in home directory tree?

[Volker Augustin]

>> is there a way to integrate "virtual folders" in the users home directory
>> tree? I would like to define .desktop files containing ioslave urls like
>> fish://user@host/path and want to assign a folder name to those urls
>> and that folder name should then be shown in the normal home directory
>> folder tree as subfolders of the folder containing them. It should be
> 
> So you simply create a link (.desktop file) via drag&drop and assign it a
> folder icon? Or do you mean having the contents of the remote filesystem
> displayed in-line with the local filesystem in tree view mode? Sounds
> interesting, but probably is hard to achieve.

Initially having the contents of the remote filesystem displayed inline was
my intention. Thus all applications would be able to use this. Maybe this
can be achieved by automounter? But then, this would require that the
IOSlaves present a virtual file system to the automounter I guess. Though
that would be really great. So what would be required?

a) ioslaves representing a virtual file system to the automounter that can
   be mounted.
b) user defined configuration file containing the configuration data
   (host names, account names, passwords if preset, mount points - of course
   those have to be created beforehand)

Here the pre-defined mount points pose a problem. Another approach might
be to create $HOME/services and have automounter mount a generic virtual
KDE services filesystem in there. So, cd-ing to that directory would show 
"subdirectories" ftp, smb, fish, ... , i.e. all ioslaves capable of 
presenting a virtual file system to the user. Changing to say fish would
than present the user with a list of the preconfigured accounts. In
konqueror an RMB action on the fish folder could bring up the dialog to
change the configuration of predefined accounts or to create new ones.

Once this was in place, I could then create links to directories in this
hierarchy, e.g. I might do
ln -s $HOME/services/fish/my_account_at_university $HOME/university

I think this would really enhance the user experience because suddenly
all information is not only accessible from one place but *seems* to be
in one place :-))

Regards,
Volker Augustin