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This idea is an extension of the existing Dolphin breadcrumb address bar:

The first one is an improvement on the breadcrumb navigation bar:


In this, as you can see, the list of folders you get by clicking the arrows between each folder in the bar has been expanded into a full tree-style navigation system, allowing you to navigate up to any folder in the hierarchy. If there were subfolders in the mythtv folder, you would be able to navigate to those, and subfolders of those subfolders, etc. You can see that not every folder has an arrow. That is because the arrow only appears when there is a subfolder you can navigate to.


This is part of my series of Dolphin ideas

Windows Vista/7 has this feature in its version of breadcrumbs. I find it very annoying, it takes a very long time for Windows to get the list of subfolders.

It shouldn't take any longer than getting the list of subfolders using the "folders" panel, which for me is very fast. There is also no reason it should interfere with existing use, just don't click the arrow if you don't want to use it.

If it can be as fast as the folders panel, that's certainly fast enough to resolve my concerns, it would be a very useful feature.

How do I do if I want to navigate to "video" (see screenshot) and not its subfolder? Clicking on the menu item isn't consistent with other KDE menus (where clicking doesn't do anything, as far as I know).

Hans wrote:How do I do if I want to navigate to "video" (see screenshot) and not its subfolder? Clicking on the menu item isn't consistent with other KDE menus (where clicking doesn't do anything, as far as I know).

Hmm, maybe there should be a "Here" option in each submenu like the Copyto and Moveto Servicemenus

Hans wrote:How do I do if I want to navigate to "video" (see screenshot) and not its subfolder? Clicking on the menu item isn't consistent with other KDE menus (where clicking doesn't do anything, as far as I know).

It is meant to be the same as the breadcrumb bar and current behavior, so clicking on the name opens the folder, clicking on the arrow opens the subfolder. It is not consistent with other menus, but neither is the breadcrumb bar itself. It is consistent with the behavior of the breadcrumb bar.

You can even see this visually if you look closely, the gradient across the folder name ends and there is a new gradient starting right before the arrow. It is meant to mimic the look of the breadcrumb bar itself.

Maybe even opening of files could be integrated into it. In place of arrow would be two arrows one for folders other for files (maybe on left side for files and right side for folders). Each would open only when arrow is clicked. This might help to achieve instant performance. And still no change to current breadcrumb behavior unless user wants it. Or maybe it could be like Classic Application Launcher, subfolders up in the list and then files.

Even more functionality could be integrated to breadcrumb. We could open context menu with right click. For example we could go to folder ten steps in folder hiarcy from root, cut file, navigate to folder six steps back and paste file there. No need to load context of any folder to the main panel, which might be time consuming. This way breadcrumb could replace display space consuming folder panel nearly completely, for me it already has.

this would make the common task (navigating to a subfolder) harder, clutter the interface and make the popup take longer to show (more stat\'ing on disk). not to mention we\'d run into issues with menus overlapping when there are too many levels or submenus ....

.. what\'s there is elegant and covers the majority use case well.