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This idea is for a new view mode for Dolphin. This particular view, single-file view, is essentially a large preview of a single file (or the first page of a file if it has multiple pages):



This isn't like Konqueror's embedded file editors, it only shows a non-interactive preview. You can navigate back and forth through the files using the left and right arrow buttons or the scroll wheel.

Although somewhat useful on its own, this gets more interesting, however, if you have a linked split view I mentioned above where one split is a normal file browser and the other is a single-file view:



Here you can see that three files were selected in the details view. In the single file view, the previews of these three files are arranged so you can see them. If you only have a single file selected, only that file is shown in the preview view, allowing you to move through the file list to see large versions of the files. But if you have more than one file selected, they will be scaled and arranged so you can see all of their previews in the same view. These previews are replaced temporarily with an individual preview of a file as you mouse over it. This would be much more efficient than click the preview button on every single one. When combined with the pinned selections above, normally selected files have precedence of pinned files. So there is a hierarchy to which preview it show. It alway shows the preview of the file your mouse is over. If your mouse is not over a file, it will show the previews of all files you have currently in a rubber-band selection box. If there is no rubber-band selection box, it shows the files that are selected normally. If there are no files selected normally, it shows the files that are pinned. If there are no files pinned, it shows nothing.

This idea is, frankly, of limited use when only the one file browser area is available. It would be much better if you had two panes, similar to a split view. There are three ways to implement this that I can think of.

One, this view automatically brings up a second pane. The specific view for that pane is flexible, you can click the view and then change the pane to whatever other view you want (besides single file mode or picture flow mentioned below). The functionality would not change. If combined with the split view menu button I mentioned earlier, you could use that to change between horizontal and vertical layout (but you could not use it to turn off the split).

The second idea is to implement this view as a panel instead of a file browser view. That panel could then be placed anywhere and resized however you wanted. Currently panels cannot be placed above or below the file browser, but this one would need to be able to do that.

The third idea would be simply to use my linked split view idea.


This is part of my series of Dolphin ideas

This idea is very useful if you have large number of files and you don't know what they are and want to just look at them and find out what they are.

This idea gets my vote.

If you use the Information panel of Dolphin you already do see a thumbnail of the file, at a size where you can actually read the first few lines. This idea seems to simply duplicate that effect. I vote against it.

Just use Konqueror and configure Okular not to show all the additional stuff.

annew wrote:If you use the Information panel of Dolphin you already do see a thumbnail of the file, at a size where you can actually read the first few lines. This idea seems to simply duplicate that effect. I vote against it.

It doesn't duplicate the functionality for two reasons. One, it allows you to view more than one file at a time, which the information panel does not. Second, the information panel has a lot of additional information which takes up a lot of additional space, restricting the size of the preview. As nepokmuk integration increases the amount of information will likely increase as well, further limiting the size of the preview.

I agree with TheBlackCat and disagree with annew.