To me it's a bit surprising that konqueror does not seem to have a community of fans comparable to that of the browser Opera, as it has some similarities in the way it can be highly customised, unlike most other file managers, if not virtually all of them.

More than KDE itself, I'm a big fan of konqueror as a file manager. I'm afraid it's going to be eventually discontinued and replaced by dolphin, as, ever since KDE 4 started, it didn't catch up with the features it had on KDE 3 (namely integration with gwenview, which made it better than gwenview to viewing and managing images, IMO, and more stable in my experience), and is recently missing one feature or another (like the quick filter field, even though I've seen in some list that the idea is to make it not be a plugin, but an integrated part. I wonder why the plugin wasn't removed after the embedded equivalent was implemented, anyway).

Here's just "show off" screen capture of konqueror, just for displaying how many sorts of stuff it can do in the same tab, even though it wouldn't be anywhere near typical to have it just like this:



File browser, file size graphical viewer, image viewer, PDF viewer... I forgot to add the embedded terminal!

My usual setup is essentially this, except that I don't open so many panes with all those different stuff at the same time, at least not in a single tab. This way it almost look ridiculous but each of these features is quite handy if you use them properly rather than just cluttering for no reason like I did. Funnily enough every now and then I stumble in some request or rant, "dolphin should have this and that", apparently from people who never used konqueror as a filemanager, becase more often than not, it's already there (like horizontal pane splitting).

The one aspect of "browser" I use the most are those bookmarks actually, but they all point to several places in my hard drive actually, that and some settings stuff that use html interfaces like the printer configuration page (somewhat like webadmin). It's only somewhat messy and reduntant in the buttons I was trying to change things to see if I managed to get the quick filter field back.


...so, that's all I guess. A semi-random topic expressing admiration for konqueror, and hoping it will be kept alive and improving.

I am a konqueror user too, did nt find any other application with this power.
I hope that in the plans of KDE devs is to continue improving and supporting it.

I am a fan of konqueror too.

Geidrow wrote:I am a fan of konqueror too.

+1, I'm afraid. I felt that Konqueror as file manager was one of KDE's real killer applications. But I think we have to accept we're in a minority here and that things are moving on.

Same here.
I'm a fan of konqueror, not just "like a file browser" but "like an internet browser" too.
I miss using "archive webpage" (now I'm using webkit, and that option can't be selected), all the minitools was very useful to me in KDE 3.x time.
Like file browser was excelent. I can did a lot of task with just konqueror, not only watch my files. The kipi plug-ins was great.
I hope the kde dev keep working and improving konqueror like those days.

Regards

Just interested, which functions of Konqueror are you missing in KDE 4 in particular?

One I recall (perhaps really the only one it never had in KDE 4, AFAIK) is integration with gwenview, which made konqueror better as a "image manager" than gwenview itself. And at least in my experience, somehow it was more stable than the standalone gwenview (is it a deja vu or did I mention that in this topic already?)

These days I use a combination of geeqie and konqueror to manage images, since each has some functionalities that the other lacks. On KDE 3, konqueror with gwenview integration still had not all the functionalities of gqview/geeqie (I think it never had a "search for duplicates" function, if I recall), but besides that it was just like geeqie with better file management (automatic renaming (at least with krename) and such things)


To be fair/not sound just like some curmudgeon ranting about how the old times were better and kids these days don't know how a real file manager should be, there are some really significative improvements on KDE4's version, besides all the technical stuff that is not really that visible on the user side. If I recall on KDE3's konqueror (or even earlier KDE4's versions) didn't have the option to "do the same thing for every file" on file operations, that's just essential. And it seems to have become noticeably faster in some recent updates, but I don't know if that's just a KDE thing or something related with kernel and the ext4 "engines". I'm not sure but I have the impression that it's also faster/easier to configure things like to have a "detailed list view" as a universal default, and file associations. I recall I used to have to go on doing the same thing over and over in several file types on some previous version.

Recently it seems that they're trying to implement some advanced renaming, krename-style integrated on konqueror, even though there's the unfortunate pop-up dialog for renaming, rather than inline renaming. I didn't use it yet I guess. It would be really nice if it were just like ACDsee's multiple-file renamer. I remember that sometimes I used ACDSee on windows to rename other stuff because it was in some ways superior as a file manager than window's own file manager.


I think I'll post somewhere my konqueror's config files, it's just a shame it does not have the instant filter anymore, if it had, with my config, it would be undisputedly the best file manager ever, with no room for argument, and not even that much room for further improvement.

fraxinus wrote:

Geidrow wrote:I am a fan of konqueror too.

+1, I'm afraid. I felt that Konqueror as file manager was one of KDE's real killer applications. But I think we have to accept we're in a minority here and that things are moving on.

I don't really like to go on distro or DE-bashing, but I think that konqueror single handedly makes KDE a superior DE to Gnome. To make things even/developers of both DEs hate me, konqueror is almost the sole reason I have other KDE stuff installed, just to satisfy its dependencies. I find hard to understand how come Ubuntu became so sucessful, being based on Gnome, thus forcing some of its file managers on users that were probably used to Windows Explorer (which is also considerably better than most of GTK's FMs). Perhaps that's why Dolphin is so well accepted, in the other hand, it's somewhat of a trimmed version of konqueror with some Gnome-ish resemblance to it.

The single most significant improvement Gnome/any DE could have was to recreate some file manager (not necessarely web browser at the same time) with all of konqueror's functionalities. In fact one could even do that and at the same time add those "desktop icons" functions to this konqueror-clone (klone?), like "rox" and/or nautilus, and there you have it, one of the best DE's you could ask for.

And to be fair to Gnome (well, at least before 3, I don't know about 3, for the little I've seen it's not as bad as haters make it out to be), most of its apps are not all that bad, what really makes it awkward are the file managers. The best one is pcmanfm, which is non-standard. And, for God sake, do they know that the PATH variable exists? It feels like it's Windows 95 when I'm on iceweasel/firefox and I'm asked to point to the exact location of an executable to open some file I've downloaded.

In regards to the Gwenview integration, this was provided by Gwenview itself. While the benefit was seen in Konqueror, it did not have much to do with the functionality itself.

Do you like the idea to make donations for konqueror ?
I have a small salary but if evreyone gives a little bit we may financier the konqueror developers

what was it? why the konqueror's web-browsing-abilities where not much improved? the dev did not have the time to do it and thats why they started to drop konqueror as a hole. if one part of this fascinating powerful prog does not really work its not good enough to be in the official release. the people need fully working programs.
make it work, fix the browser engine, then we can start sending bug reports and make konqueror the number one.

i really like the idea of konqueror!