Hi


I know it is complicated to maintain that feature.

This is an extract from an older Dolphin maintainer:

http://ppenz.blogspot.com.es/2012/01/do ... pdate.html

" You are right: The column view is not available anymore and also won't be available in later Dolphin releases. The decision to drop the column view was not easy. I myself liked the column view a lot and used it e.g. for browsing my music collection. However the column view has obviously been used by only very few people but was tricky and timeconsuming to maintain. For a project like Dolphin it is important that patches also can be written by non-core developers, but the column view introduced an internal code complexity that raised the "entry-barrier" for contributors unnecessary (and also made it tricky for us core-developers). In fact there is no big Dolphin team that can take care about maintaining something timeconsuming that is used by only a ratter small group (and I count myself as part of this group). So it was a hard decision but in the end we went for having a maintainable code-base to be able to do the things we offer really right instead of offering things that we are not able to maintain.
January 4, 2012 at 10:33 AM "

That being said I think it was and could again be one of the top KDE features.

Hands up who wants this back.

Mine is here.


Thanks for your project and time.


Best regards.

PS: I tried to fill a feature request in the bugtracker but I didn't figure out how to do it properly neither found actual info if anyone has requested this. So to make some "noise" I thought writing this post could be helpful for some users. I do apologize if this is an inconvenient procedure.

Thanks for your post. Please note that the situation has not really changed since the blog post that you quoted has been written.
All relevant information can be found in

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=290747

and duplicates of that report.

Implementing and maintaining a columns view is still a very challenging project, and the group of users who want it back is still quite small (but admittedly much larger than the group of people who are willing to spend their free time writing and maintaining code for Dolphin or doing other useful things for the project, such as answering user questions here).

Please read the report that I have linked to above and all duplicates before you consider adding a new comment there. This might prevent that you waste your time asking questions that have been discussed over and over again, like in

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=333744

and

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=336563

Thank you for your understanding.

If the columns view feature is very important to you, the easiest solution is that you downgrade Dolphin to the latest version that had this feature. This can be achieved, e.g., by building the source code for that version, which is a pretty straightforward process. If you need help with that, just ask (I might need a week to answer though because I do not have access to a proper computer at the moment).

You could even make the old Dolphin version available as an add-on package for your distribution, such that other users who miss the columns view can benefit from it.

Hi Frank

I really appreciate your kind answer. I saw many bug reports on the matter merged into one. But I thought at least many of them were sufficiently old to add a new one or at least ask for information on the matter again.

I do really apologize if this isn't the case.

Now... I like the idea of having my own "personal" Dolphin version. The "problem" is I do not have many expertise in computing and... I also use PC-BSD (although I play with the original FreeBSD from time to time).
I can wait for your instructions and I'll definitely give it a try and see if I can really get that feature back. I am now on a project where I am managing 800 folders and around 3000 files. As you can imagine having a good environment to move around is basic for being efficient and productive.


Thanks again for your time and your patience.


Best regards

Albert

Sorry for the late response. Some time ago, I posted instructions to build Dolphin from source (provided you have kdelibs development packages installed) in https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=334355 (there was a typo in the inital instructions, note that a user provided a fix).

To build the latest version that has the Columns view, you have to insert

git checkout v4.7.4

before the cmake step.

Note that all improvements that were made to Dolphin in the past 3 years will be lost then though, and it could be that some things (most notably, tagging files and retrieving meta data in the information panel) might not work because Nepomuk was replaced by Baloo in the mean time.