Dolphin change proposals

[todd rme]

On Mon, Feb 22, 2010 at 1:55 AM, Peter Penz <peter.penz at gmx.at> wrote:
> Hi Todd,
>
> On Saturday 20 February 2010 19:11:37 todd rme wrote:
>> On Sun, Jan 10, 2010 at 4:04 PM, todd rme <toddrme2178 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> > I have a few things I would like to try to implement for dolphin, but
>> > I before I get started I want to check to see whether people think
>> > they are good ideas or not. They are (in no particular order):
>> >
>> > ...
>> >
>> > File count for groups.  This would just be a bit of text next to the
>> > group name saying how many files are present in the group.  It is not
>> > very useful for small groups, but I think it is useful when dealing
>> > with very large groups of files that cannot all be seen at one time.
>> > At least for me this has the same use as showing the number of files
>> > in the entire folder in the status bar, as Dolphin currently does.
>>
>> This "file count for groups" idea is next on my todo list, but some
>> people expressed concerns about it.  I would like to reach a consensus
>> on this before I start working on it.  So does everyone think this is
>> a good idea?
>
> I'm not sure whether there are other applications that might want this
> feature, but from a Dolphin point of view I don't plan to enable the "file
> count for groups" feature. IMO it only adds visual + API clutter and does not
> help for for the default use case where grouping is done: having small groups
> like e. g. in the system settings.
>
> If the user really needs the number of files for a group: this is already
> possible by clicking on the group header (-> the status bar shows the number
> of selected items). Another idea would be that the number of items are shown
> in the statusbar, if the group header gets hovered.

Valid points, although I disagree that it is not helpful for
applications like Dolphin that can have a large number of extremely
large groups.  Additionally, it also looks like much of the underlying
architecture necessary to support collapsing groups is already there,
leading me to believe that this feature will be implemented at some
point in the future.  I think this feature will be particularly
important for collapsed groups, since you wouldn't be able to get any
idea how large the group is without uncollapsing it.

-Todd