[dolphin] [Bug 492404] Dolphin doesn't select the parent folder when Up or Back is being pressed

[Felix Ernst]

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=492404

--- Comment #29 from Felix Ernst <felixernst at kde.org> ---
(In reply to Ben Guy-Williams from comment #27)
> 1. When returning to a parent folder, it is marked too subtly.

Yes, this is something we want to change regardless of this bug report here.
This is tracked in https://invent.kde.org/system/dolphin/-/issues/53. Just
needs someone to put the work in.

> 2. When returning to a parent folder, it is marked active, but not selected.
> 
> I frequently hit F3 to go dual pane before entering a folder; for this
> scenario, I'll say I have downloaded a bunch of mp3 files to /music/mp3.
> 
> Let's enter mp3, convert them all to opus, then return to the parent - then
> possibly rename it to 'opus' (now not possible, hitting F2 now enters
> 'selection' mode despite the 'current file' being already highlighted).

Yes, with the current state of Dolphin it is necessary to first select the
folder. Nothing is selected when returning to the parent folder, similarly to
how nothing is selected when a folder is opened by activating it in the
"Places" panel, when opening a folder by activating it in the main view, when
opening a new tab, or when opening an URL from outside of Dolphin.

> Shift+F6 also will enter selection mode rather than move that folder to the
> other pane... it will need to be re-selected and I'm not sure how to do that
> other than use the arrow key.

Ctrl+Space will select the current item. Simply "Space" by itself will also do
this, but only if you don't have bound "Space" to be the keyboard shortcut of
some other feature (which it currently is by default). In selection mode with
the latest Dolphin release, pressing "Enter" will also select the current item.

(In reply to flan_suse from comment #28)
> Ben, I appreciate your feedback and tests, which show how this problem
> affects more than one thing about the user experience.
> 
> Unfortunately, I think that trying to go point by point misses the bigger
> picture: Deselecting an opened item or visited folder should never have been
> made into the default […]

The bigger picture really also must take into account that it is very easy to
move items to the trash by accident when items are implicitly selected. 

> 1. This is babysitting users, without a means to disable the "safety feature"

It is not just babysitting. One does not need to be dumb or clumsy for this to
happen (previous to the change you want to see reverted):

A user just needs to click the semi-transparent selection rectangle on top of a
file icon instead of clicking the file itself in double-click mode, and then
the file is added to the selection instead of becoming solely selected by
itself. Press "Delete" or a muscle memory "Shift+Delete" into "Enter" then, and
instead of only permanently deleting the file the user just clicked on, any
previously selected files will also be permanently deleted. All of that only
because the user clicked a selection rectangle by accident whose existence they
might not even be aware of because it only appears on hover!

> muscle memory

> No other OS'es or DE's do this: Not Windows, COSMIC, MATE, Xfce, GNOME, or
> even earlier versions of KDE.

I understand the frustration, but we really need to find a solution that
prevents such accidental data loss to happen. Sorry about the break of muscle
memory, but other file managers might for example not have such selection
rectangles that allow accidentally adding files to a selection. Whatever they
do differently does not change the fact that we would have even less safeguards
against data loss if we automatically select files on the users behalf. A user
first needing to select a file before acting on it is one way to make sure of
this (Keyboard-only users are exempt from this). There are various we could
change Dolphin which might similarly prevent the data loss scenario described
above. If we find a good way, we might be able to revert that change.

What I don't want to see is a change that re-introduces that potential for data
loss, just because we value muscle memory in mixed workflows of mouse
navigating and then activating keyboard shortcuts higher than data loss. Even
though it really only takes one extra click to work around this change. I hope
you understand.

> 2. It's *inconsistent* with KDE: They recently added a new context menu
> called "Extract here and delete", which cannot be removed from the menu. I
> have accidentally trashed my archives multiple times because of this menu
> item. I cannot even disable it. This is sending mixed messages: "We want to
> protect our users from accidentally deleting things, but also we want to
> make it really easy to accidentally delete things".

So, I was not aware of such a change, and it actually is *not* a Dolphin
change. That "Extract here and delete" action is provided by Ark, not Dolphin.

That being said, the common logic is that there should be no accidental data
loss. "Extract here and delete" is probably not meant to cause data loss,
because the data from that archive is extracted. While the archive will be
deleted, its contents should survive. If this is not the case, I would consider
this a bug we should prioritise to fix.

-- 
You are receiving this mail because:
You are on the CC list for the bug.