GSoC 2016 File Trays Project Idea Survey

[Arnav Dhamija]

Hi!

I am a first year undergraduate student at university interested in 
working for KDE for the GSoC 2016. A short summary of my project idea is 
as follows:

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 or in completely different directories. 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, archive, rename, 
create list of symbolic links, etc. This makes complex file operations 
easy by staging the operation before performing it. This panel works 
very similarly to the Split view already existing in Dolphin to make 
additions such as drag and drop very easy.

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.

More information, mockups, and potential use cases for this project can 
be found here: https://git.reviewboard.kde.org/r/126622/

So far, this project idea has received positive feedback from the KDE 
Usability team. I am now in the user requirements research phase of this 
project, and I have created a short survey to assess the needs of users 
here: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/L9LDW2P

I look forward to the participation of those interested in this survey 
to make Dolphin an even better file manager : )
-- 
arnav dhamija
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