Review Request 115357: Add a shortcut for copying current directory

[Frank Reininghaus]

> On Jan. 28, 2014, 3:58 p.m., Frank Reininghaus wrote:
> > First of all, thanks for the patch!
> > 
> > To quote my comment https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=323960#c3 :
> > 
> > "...this is one of the cases where I wonder if this feature is really useful enough that it justifies adding code which must be maintained in the future, and adding another action that makes the shortcuts dialog harder to use (I admit that it's a big mess not not very useable already)."
> 
> Frank Reininghaus wrote:
>     Hm, I shouldn't have copied the typo from the comment ("not not" -> "and not"):
>     
>     "...this is one of the cases where I wonder if this feature is really useful enough that it justifies adding code which must be maintained in the future, and adding another action that makes the shortcuts dialog harder to use (I admit that it's a big mess and not very useable already)."
> 
> Yichao Zhou wrote:
>     Well.  I really like this feature...
>     
>     IMHO, adding 2 more actions really will not make shortcuts dialog much harder to use.  See, we already have had more than 70 actions there.  Add 2 extra options will at most cost us about 3% increase of entropy even if they are totally useless.
>     
>     For the maintenance overhead, this patch only adds 70 lines of code, most of which is the declaration.  I think it is unlikely that any part of it will be modified in the future.
>     
>     Anyway.  I think that's all what I can do.  If main developers really do not will to merge it, let's just leave it here.

If you look at the hundreds of wishlist reports at bugs.kde.org, you will find the sentences "I really like this feature" and "I don't think that this little change will make Dolphin much harder to use" very frequently. And yes, many of these wishes could be implemented with less than 100 lines. Every single request may look quite harmless, but if a considerable number of them was implemented, their effects on usability and code complexity would add up, and then they would not look so harmless any more.

Therefore, the question if a feature is really important enough for a considerable part of our user base to justify these (potentially bad) side effects must be evaluated for every single feature before we can consider to add it.

For the feature which is under discussion here, we have one single user (you) who wants the feature, and IMHO, this is by far not enough to justify a non-trivial change in the application. Sorry about that.

That being said, I acknowledge that people will always have ideas how Dolphin could be modified to better suit their workflows. Probably the best solution for everyone would be to enable users to add functionality to Dolphin.

Christoph suggested in your wishlist report to make it possible to assign shortcuts to service menu entries. This approach might have some problems though, e.g., that there are KAbstractFileItemAction plugins which create (possibly multiple) actions at runtime. This would make it impossible to assign any shortcuts to these actions in advance. Moreover, there would always be an ambiguity concerning "apply the action to the selected items/the current item" and "apply the action to the view URL".

An alternative solution might be a way to assign shortcuts to external applications, and optionally pass either the URL which is shown in the view, or the URL of the selected items or the current item on the command line. You could then easily implement your wish without any further changes in Dolphin by assigning the new shortcut to an application that copies its command line argument(s) to the clipboard.

I'm not sure what would be the best way to expose such a functionality to the user though, and I'm not even sure if this makes any sense at all. Maybe one could start a discussion about this issue on the usability mailing list.


- Frank


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On Jan. 28, 2014, 3:55 p.m., Yichao Zhou wrote:
> 
> -----------------------------------------------------------
> This is an automatically generated e-mail. To reply, visit:
> https://git.reviewboard.kde.org/r/115357/
> -----------------------------------------------------------
> 
> (Updated Jan. 28, 2014, 3:55 p.m.)
> 
> 
> Review request for Dolphin.
> 
> 
> Bugs: 323960
>     http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=323960
> 
> 
> Repository: kde-baseapps
> 
> 
> Description
> -------
> 
> Add 2 shortcuts as described in
> https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=323960
> 
> 1. Copy current URL to Clipboard
>   Default Shortcut: Ctrl-Alt-C
> 
> 2. Set current Url to the one in Clipboard
>   Default Shortcut: Ctrl-Alt-D (Because Ctrl-Alt-V is occupied by Klipper, D could be understood as "dispatch" maybe..
> 
> 
> Diffs
> -----
> 
>   dolphin/src/dolphinmainwindow.h 6b046c2 
>   dolphin/src/dolphinmainwindow.cpp a4dbb6f 
> 
> Diff: https://git.reviewboard.kde.org/r/115357/diff/
> 
> 
> Testing
> -------
> 
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Yichao Zhou
> 
>

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