Dolphin left panel improvements request

[Mathias Dufresne]

Hi all,

Until few months I was Konqueror with its "filemanagement" profile to deal
with my files and folders using my mouse. Since Konqueror is not able to do
that as it is concentrating itself on Web content which seems logical.

I first sent a mail to David Faure as the patch which seemed to me
(according to description, not the code which I don't understand,
unfortunately) responsible to the removal of these features and after a
small but quite interesting discussion I'm here to discuss about the
features I'd like to see added to Dolphin and why I think they are
interesting.

Before starting I must say I'm not very good in languages and can sound a
bit rough when speaking English. My point is not shout ;)

First which panel am I speaking about ?
The one showing only directories, accessible with F7 (thank's again David
for the tip ;)

What I was in love with into Konqueror and I'd like to see added into
Dolphin's directories only left panel:
- into Konqueror folders were not movable in left panel. David said it was
a bug and even if complained alone when faced to that first I finally
became very found of it.
Why? The left panel is not where we work, we work mainly with files and
files are into right panel. The left panel is then used only to select
where we want to work. It's preparation of work, more work but still not
the real work. This preparation can be performed with not much attention.

A real world example of that is flat painting: you can be really careful
applying paint on walls but you can hate to prepare the flat (some sheet on
the floor, adhesive band around the surface to paint...) to avoid paint to
be splattered everywhere. Some won't prepare the flat nor clean it after it
ruined. The walls will be very well painted but the floor will be also :)

- add in left panel context menu (when right clicking on some folder) same
"open with" menu which is available in right panel.
This seems to be an easy task but, again, I have no idea of the complexity
of it, I don't "code".

- the possibility to display only the folders into user home directory
rather than necessarily display the whole system tree.
My dear mother which is now 68 is a Linux user for years but she's not a
system admin (I can assure you that ;) and files and folders management is
still a real pain to her. And unfortunately I don't expect things will be
better in the future...
For her seeing the whole system tree will be something which will afraid
her a lot. For me it is just a pain to find my home folder in the whole but
I know it's there and I know where. She's always afraid of computers, she's
never sure things are there nor where they are...

- in konqueror there were some small buttons to choose which left panel we
want to use (full system tree, home folder only tree...) and they were a
nice and quick way to switch among the views.
Perhaps an option to show these buttons or not would be nice. They were
nice shortcut for user knowing what they do but I remind my mother calling
one evening because she clicked on one of those without noticing or at
least not understanding what just happened... she lost the view, the only
one she was used to enough to deal with and had now idea why it changed nor
how to revert that change.

- a last thing which is not about the folders panel but the "places" panel:
That's a panel I don't use but after discussing with David I finally
understood its purpose: an easy access to (at least) USB pens.
My Mom does not mount anything at all, I do (using xterm, thanks to OpenVPN
:) which is not the most efficient way. Here the "places" panel would be
great to help here but once again, it is to complex for I ask her to learn
it: at least this panel should have an option to not show mounted devices.
I ask for an option here because I'm very sure Dolphin have already a lot
of users used to see mounted devices, users which most certainly use this
buttons as shortcut to access devices rather searching into the tree.

I'll try to follow that but summer's here for all of us. So I will wish you
all a great time during that summer, sunny time or fresh time, or both, as
you like :)

Cheers,

mathias
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