Dolphin file manager usability

[Peter Penz]

Hello Luca!

On Tuesday 17 July 2007 15:05:07 lbell at tsc4.com wrote:
> Hello, I was playing with kde4 alpha 2 Dolphin version and I have some
> notes about it.
> I know that there is a near feature freeze, but if someone finds some
> point interesting enough, I can do some work in a separate Dolphin branch
> under your guidance.

Thanks, any help is welcome!

> Groups management
> 1) How about to have in the group header, items count and size, the
> minimum information to give to the user an idea of the contained items?

Technically this won't be a problem, but from my point of the nice thing about 
the item grouping is having a clean layout. Adding an item count, size, ... 
to each header would just add clutter IMO. I don't see this information as 
that important for the user.

> 2) Can we open and close the group by clicking on a + sign next to it ?

Maybe Rafael, who implemented the grouping mechanism, can give some input 
here from a technical point of view.

From the Dolphin perspective introducing such a mechanism would add additional 
complexity and raises some questions:
- Should the collapsing state for each group remembered for each directory?
- When selecting all items: should collapsed groups be selected too?
- It introduces a logical one-level treeview within a directory and the 
collapsing state must toggle when performing drag & drop.

The grouping mechanism is implemented inside KCategoryView, which might get 
moved from Dolphin into kdelibs for KDE 4.1. Maybe it might make sense for 
other applications having collapsable groups (Amarok?), but from the Dolphin 
point of view I fear that adding this feature raises more problems than it 
solves. But I'm open for other opinions, maybe I'm missing a point here...

> 3) If the group is closed a click can select all the contained items

All items can already be selected by clicking on the group header. Do you mean 
that when the group is closed that still all items should be selected then?

> 4) can we open and close all the groups  with a single key?

Usually a key is bound to an action which should be visible in the menu -> yet 
another menu item... For sure it would be possible assigning a key without an 
action, but then this feature is not discoverable and might have side effects 
when changing the shortcuts for existing actions...

> Other views
>  1) Why not to have a grouping in the column view?
>  2) Why not to have a grouping in the detail view?

This is more a technical problem than a design decision. I'm also not sure how 
a grouping inside a column view and details view should look like. Do you 
also expect having headers between each group? Or just any other kind of 
visual separation between the groups?

> In some configuration windows like 'Configuring shortcuts' there are
> treeviews that doesn't open to show entirely the labels. The labels must
> be shown by enlarging the window if it is necessary. This is a small note
> but it makes a big usability improvement.

The shortcuts dialog is not Dolphin specific, but I'm sure it will be improved 
for KDE 4.0.

Best regards,
Peter