GSoC 2016 Project Idea Usability Suggestions

[Arnav Dhamija]

Hi everyone

I am a first year computer science undergraduate at the university and I 
have a project idea I want to implement in the Dolphin file manager. 
Response from the Dolphin team has been positive and they have suggested 
bringing the issue towards the usability side to create an easy to use 
GUI to make this happen. My idea is as follows:

*Trays Panel Extension for the Dolphin File Manager for improving GUI 
file selection operations**
*
Selecting multiple files in any file manager for copying and pasting has 
never been a pleasant experience, especially if the files are in a 
non-continuous order. Often, when copying files between devices we might 
find that we need to select only a subset of the required files we have 
selected and this leads to the unwieldy operation of removing files from 
our selection. Of course, the common workaround is to create a new 
folder and to put all the items in  but this is a very inefficient 
process and can be very slow if large files need to be copied between 
devices.

My solution to this problem is to add a panel/view in Dolphin where the 
links to files and folders can be temporarily saved for a session. The 
files and folders are "staged" on this panel. Hence, the user can add 
folders and files from several different directories to this panel and 
can then collectively perform actions on all the items in the tray such 
as copy, paste, cut, upload images in selection to Facebook, upload 
files to Dropbox, etc. This makes complex file operations easy by 
staging the operation before performing it.

Files can be added to this tray by using a right-click context menu 
option or by using the mouse scroll click or drag and drop. As an 
additional option, the session for the File Tray Panel can be saved for 
later use.

My initial idea was to have another *split view *mode with its button in 
the toolbar in Dolphin. It will function similarly to the existing split 
view but with one half of the screen dedicated to the "Files tray". This 
would make it neatly integrated with Dolphin's existing toolset and it 
would make dragging and dropping easy. Dolphin maintainer Emmanuel 
Pescosta suggested using Plasmoids to make the project more cohesive 
with KDE and to make it usable with multiple applications (eg Gwenview).

I would be much obliged to hear feedback from the usability and visual 
design team on this and suggestions for a cleaner UI. Thanks!

-- 
arnav dhamija
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