I never understood quite right why Dolphin was born.
Konqueror did everything perfectly well as a file manager and more.

I can create an arbitrary number of tabs and splits, vertical and horizontal, to view as many folders as I want and at once. In Dolphin I can create tabs, but only one vertical split.

If I want to scatter files from a USB drive, FTP or even HTTP site into several different folders, I use to create two or three horizontal splits at right with the target directories and the source at left.

I use to do something like this to check directories contents also.

In Konqueror this is pretty simple, but impossible in any other file manager or viewer I know.

In fact, the only things I see in Dolphin and I don't have in Konqueror (for an arbitrary reason, not for "impossibility of having") are the filter bar and navigable location bar, along some minor menu options. Including those in Konqueror would make Dolphin completely redundant and Konqueror complete as it was in KDE 3.*.

I would really like to see things evolving this way.
I see no point in having different tools to deal with so correlated matters and making them crippled just to be able to justify their multiple existences.

Better see development focused in a single and good tool as Konqueror is, no matter how it is going to be called.

Once again I agree. The move over to Dolphin has never made very much sense to me, except that it's a bit more intuitive for beginners to use. Who cares? Newbies need to be taught, not have their hands held. It would be a lot less work to migrate Dolphin's functionality over to Konqueror than it would be to do the opposite. Right now I'm using Krusader, but it wouldn't take much for me to move back over to Konqueror.

Konqueror had numerous bug reports against it - it's a funny thing that it only become known as perfection when it was no longer default. The root of the matter is that the code had developed over years, the original writers of the code were no longer around, and no-one could unravel the code enough to correct it. It was simply a nightmare.

Actually, there's little I agree with in your statements. I don't see it as more intuitive for beginners. I see it as a different paradigm with a great deal of benefit.

Dolphin is a spoon, Konqueror is a knife. Definitly, a spoon is better for beginner. But you can build a spoon using a knife, not a knife using a spoon. That's the problem.

It's not worth answering that. After 10 pages there surely can be nothing more to say

annew wrote:It's not worth answering that. After 10 pages there surely can be nothing more to say

For me it comes down to this: KDE has always been (for me) about integrated functionality. Very tight integration amongst apps that are designed to work together, and can often be embedded into one another so as to avoid opening multiple windows. The file browser is a VERY fundamental part of that experience, and Dolphin's stand-alone nature makes it impossible. At the very least it needs to get an embedded terminal and an embedded file viewer before I'm willing to try it again.

By the way, you said tree view was available in Dolphin. Where? I haven't been able to find it.

annew wrote:It's not worth answering that. After 10 pages there surely can be nothing more to say

Nothing MORE to say?

I think it may be time to pay more attention to everything already said.
There's really no need to say more. The simple fact of having 10 pages of people manifesting equal thoughts must be enough for itself.

Instead, your position seems to be arguing that Konqueror basecode is messy, so anybody else needs its functionality.

This approach is incontestably wrong. Developers must work on what their customers want, not what they like (I'd like to tell it to a bunch of Java developers, but not here).

If Konqueror codebase is junk, throw it away and do it right from new.
The codebase and functionality are different things. One can be bad, I won't discuss, but the other, by yards of advance, is good, so, must be kept.

Please watch out what people here are saying. There is a big true in the rationale. We want Konqueror because it IS good - from the user viewpoint, of course. We trust the KDE team to develop with the best competence, but we need them to HEAR what we want to be developed.

I feel crippled using Dolphin because I know there is a lot of things I could do before in Konqueror and can't do anymore. This is a user point of view corroborated by several others. So please find out a way to give users the flexibility and power they were used to have before, no matter how you do it. It is your metier, not ours. You know how to do.

2handband wrote:That's another thing Dolphin doesn't have... an embedded terminal. Lack of an embedded terminal in a file manager is a show-stopper for me; I still do about 70% of my file management in command-line.

What do you mean? Dolphin has an embedded terminal and has since the beginning.

TheBlackCat wrote:

2handband wrote:That's another thing Dolphin doesn't have... an embedded terminal. Lack of an embedded terminal in a file manager is a show-stopper for me; I still do about 70% of my file management in command-line.

What do you mean? Dolphin has an embedded terminal and has since the beginning.

Where is it?

did you look in views -> panel?

I see it. It's not enough to make me switch to Dolphin, however.

The problem with Dolphin terminal tab is still the broken focus model. "click to focus" works, "focus follows mouse" does not. Anyway, it's the same in Konqueror, as the only working focus model in KDE4 is "click to focus".

To be fair, the focus model of that terminal tab was broken in KDE3, too, but it was the only place where "focus follows mouse" did not work (there should be a bugreport about that, anyway).

For me KDE4 is still like going to a circus: colorfull, nice, entertaining, but the sword of the sword-swallower is made of plastic.

2handband wrote:Except for one BlackCat: KDE 3.x. In my opinion there are two file managers in the world worth using: Konqueror and Krusader. Anything less is really just a file browser. And I don't need to give you a feature list; you know as well as I do that Dolphin won't do a tenth of what those two apps are capable of.

I hope you realize that you are not a typical user. Dolphin is already one of the most advanced file managers around, and by far the most advanced default file manager. Most people neither need nor use extremely advanced functionality that konqueror and krusader has but dolphin does not. Most users do stuff like moving files around, copying and pasting, renaming, etc. That is the normal use-case for file managers. Dolphin is aimed to work for ordinary use-cases, not niche use-cases like yours. All of the features and capabilities for konqueror and krusader are fine if you use them, but they get in the way if your just want to do normal file-managing tasks.

That is a major reason why dolphin was created. Besides being a coding nightmare, konqueror just had too many panels and buttons and menus and sub-menus, and all that just got in the way of ordinary file-managing tasks. It was great for advanced users but resulted in a very steep learning curve for people not already familiar with it, and that was a major turn-off for konqueror and KDE by extension. So to make a file manager that was usable for non-experts there was only two options, make a new file manager or strip out most of konqueror's features. The latter case would obviously anger the small subset of users who actually wanted the advanced features, so the decision was to go with the former. Continuing to use konqueror as the default file manager was simply not an option if we wanted KDE to be used by anyone other than the most advanced computer gurus on the planet.

samhain wrote:The problem with Dolphin terminal tab is still the broken focus model. "click to focus" works, "focus follows mouse" does not. Anyway, it's the same in Konqueror, as the only working focus model in KDE4 is "click to focus".

To be fair, the focus model of that terminal tab was broken in KDE3, too, but it was the only place where "focus follows mouse" did not work (there should be a bugreport about that, anyway).

Let me see if I get this correctly: Dolphin is inferior to konqueror in 3.5 because it doesn't have a feature that konqueror never had and was probably never going to have? I don't quite understand that logic.

And what is wrong with the other focus models in KDE4? They seem to work fine for me.

> Let me see if I get this correctly: Dolphin is inferior to konqueror in
> 3.5 because it doesn't have a feature that konqueror never had and was
> probably never going to have? I don't quite understand that logic.
LOL ... no, I was hoping that the reimplementation would solve that old problem. Didn't, anyhow.

> And what is wrong with the other focus models in KDE4? They seem to work
> fine for me.
"focus follows mouse" is broken on all plasmoids, that generate a popup when the mouse is over them. Try folderview and move the mouse over a folder. Or the infamouse cashew.