... from the point of view of a happy konqueror user.

I have noticed the strong reactions to dolphin in this forum and admit to feeling a sense of complete despair when I first tried out dolphin. My immediate thought was "aargh! why??? konqueror is perfect..."

So, what sucks about dolphin *at first glance* is:
1. dumbed down (cant directly type file location)
2. no folders view just this stupid "locations thing" - need my tree view
3. massive waste of space on the right giving me information I already know about a single file - damn it I'm trying to browse a bunch of files why does it get in the way!
4. no tabbed view - man that was so useful
5. I loved my terminal window... there's no way they are going to preserve a feature like that in this dumbed down piece of...

So after playing with dolphin for a while you get to discover that most of the above can be fixed
1. There is a magic place to click that allows you to directly edit the file path. It would be nice if it was a bit more visible. And there is a setting to make it editable on startup - w00t.
2. there *is* a folders panel and it compliments the location panel nicely. Now I'm starting to remember all those weird tabs at the side of konq that I learned not to bother using...
3. you can customize-off the waste of space "information" panel. Hey some people may like it. Personally I don't.
4. in place of tabbed view I can get a split view.
5. There *is* a terminal window! Thank you thank you!
6. There's a filter entry widget hidden away also... nice


But... you also find more issues:
1. can't mount disks and unmounting is hidden (the mac and gnome file managers give you a nice eject icon... in dolphin you have to right-click)
2. If you navigate to an smb share or other service then click on the service part of the location navigator thing you get a dauntingly large menu.
3. For some reason dolphin crashed the first time I tried to browse smb.
4. Split view is no substitute for tabs. It doesn't play well with the folders panel (which side of the split is the folder view tracking?) I would open a new file browser window before using split view. This is a shame because tabs were quite intuitive and reduced desktop clutter.
5. Panel placement doesn't seem as "right" as it was in konq. I like to have the folders (and now locations) on the left of the browser extending its full height. I then have the main part of the interface split vertically between the folder contents and the terminal. Just cant do this... but I'm forgiving this one.


In konqlusion... :

I'm almost happy to use dolphin now! Unfortunately not being able to mount disks is a bit of a show stopper because ubuntu doesn't automatically mount my windows volume. I think a more sympathetic default layout of the panels in dolphin would make migration easier for all us happy KDE3 users. For example: stack the folders and locations panels and perhaps the information panels on on top the other on the left - tabs are fine! I'd also like to see tabs come back again for the main file view window.

Hope some of this is useful. For the moment I am using gnome as, at least in *ubuntu 8.10, everything seems to work in gnome whereas kde4 feels inconsistent, flaky and slow (maybe it is the build options and choice of theme?) I expect it will improve with the official release however.

andre_orwell wrote:4. no tabbed view - man that was so useful

You can still open tabs by hitting CTRL+SHIFT+N or choosing "New tab" from the "File" menu.

5. I loved my terminal window... there's no way they are going to preserve a feature like that in this dumbed down piece of...

You can toggle the terminal window by hitting F4 or View > Panels > Terminal.[size=xx-small] Oh wait, just read the rest of your post... [/size]

Dolphin would be absolutely great if it weren't for the crashes and slowness while moving/copying files I experience regularly. New features are great of course, but for now I think Dolphin should focus on stability and speed before moving on to implementing new feature sets.

Which version of KDE do you have installed? There is a "Tab View" since KDE 4.1 (File > New Tab) or Ctrl+Shift+N (which is the default shortkey. But you can modify it using Settings > Configure Shortcuts...)

As I read your post, I wanted to say. Why so shout about those features that are missing and then find out that they exists. But perhaps you have a reason to yell b/c you are a konqueror user. Perhaps it would nice for you to change the complete settings to "Konqueror Mode" where you have the Folder View, the location bar and others as default.

Cheers, m.

Hi msoeken,

Sorry if the format of the post was confusing. What I wanted to communicate was the evolution in thinking I went through as I started to transition from konqeror to dolphin. This might stop some others from ranting unnecessarily and also help developers understand what people are having problems with.

Hey - thanks for the heads up on the tabs... sweet

Places are not bookmarks, places can't display hierarchies

But in kde4 Dolphin is much more stable and much less bug-ridden then Konqueror

Dolphin doesn't feel like a KDE app

I'd also wish for there to be an option of having an editable locationbar by default instead of the GTK-styled one. I really don't find it too useful, personally.

Alec wrote:I'd also wish for there to be an option of having an editable locationbar by default instead of the GTK-styled one. I really don't find it too useful, personally.

Settings -> Configure Dolphin... -> Check the "Editable Location bar" checkbox.

am i the only one who find dolphin the best new thing in kde4 ?, i never liked konqueror as a file manager, i am not huge fan of a super file manager, viewer and browser in the same time, but i do understand that "power user" miss all those zillion way of using konqueror. i hope one day we will get a real web browser for kde, until that, opera fill the gap.

Yes Opera fill the gap but I hope that the Firefox Qt can be the KDE 4 default Browser - in the Future.....
I heard from an Project like this.....

djouallah wrote:am i the only one who find dolphin the best new thing in kde4 ?, i never liked konqueror as a file manager, i am not huge fan of a super file manager, viewer and browser in the same time, but i do understand that "power user" miss all those zillion way of using konqueror. i hope one day we will get a real web browser for kde, until that, opera fill the gap.

You are not the only one I like dolphin.

The first post was amusing. The first thought that struck me was 'OK, great. Here we have a user complaining about Dolphin being "dumbed down", and s/he can't even find those simple things?!'. Hehe, seems I jumped to conclusions, sorry about that.

I like Konqueror, and I also like Dolphin.

One thing I'm not overly satisfied with in Dolphin is the breadcrumb bar. As a result I posted a bug report a while ago. And this brings me to my point: one of my favorite "features" in Dolphin, as strange as it may sound, is Peter Penz. He always listens to your opinions and gives you feedback, and is just generally very friendly. In the case of my bug report, he added small feature - not exactly what I wanted, but my request had its flaws - try Ctrl+Enter when you edit the location.

As I think Dolphin is good app in the KDE4 way.
But there is one thing that Dolphin is missed - shortcut to moving between parts in split mode (like in MC or Krusader) + shortcuts for moving between opened tabs.

Need more shortcuts in Dolphin!

I disliked Dolphin intensely when I first saw it and I am still undecided but the more recent versions are getting better. The big missing feature for me is file viewing. With konq I never bothered with an image viewer but simply opened images in konq. For those document formats that konq could handle being able to quickly view them without opening another program was the main feature of konq that I really liked.

I think having konq as a web browser and file manager was a mistake but have always thought it would have been better to have split off the web browsing into a seperate app and then tidied up the file manager side of konq rather than create Dolphin.

I do find that for some reason I use different styles of file manager in Linux to windows. In windows I always use a dual pane stle with detailed list (FreeCommander) whereas in Linux I tend to stick with the default icon view.

pento wrote:As I think Dolphin is good app in the KDE4 way.
But there is one thing that Dolphin is missed - shortcut to moving between parts in split mode (like in MC or Krusader) + shortcuts for moving between opened tabs.

Need more shortcuts in Dolphin!

I wrote a patch which implements shortcuts for switching between opened tabs. I will send it to the mailing list and perhaps it will be included in KDE 4.2. But I am not sure, because it is soft feature freeze now.

Cheers, m.

Nice to read everyone's follow-ups.

Re a shortcut for switching between tabs... why is there not a global
shortcut for this?  This is one of the things I configured manually in
3.5 - 'cause I had tabs in the console window, web browser, file
browser, editors.  Would be nice to have uniformity on this.

My main motivation was to make it clear that dolphin works well but the
default layout gives a bad first impression to (at least some) KDE
fans.  Until you "configure it right" it feels like you have lost a lot
more than you gained.