Hi,
I use Dolphin on a daily basis. I really love it (despite it is a slow).
It has this weird behavior where when you hit F3 on a dual view (in order to get back to single view): it closes the view that has the focus. WTF!
It is the opposite of logic, and the opposite of the usual behavior I ever saw elsewhere.

Is there any way to change that?
Should I file a bug?

Thanks for you answer.

nadir wrote:Hi,
I use Dolphin on a daily basis. I really love it (despite it is a slow).
It has this weird behavior where when you hit F3 on a dual view (in order to get back to single view): it closes the view that has the focus. WTF!
It is the opposite of logic, and the opposite of the usual behavior I ever saw elsewhere.

Is there any way to change that?
Should I file a bug?

Thanks for you answer.

That is the behavior I would expect logically, i.e. to close the window that has focus. I am not trying to be a wise guy. That's just what I would expect to happen.

This is the opposite of the logic of : nemo in Cinnamon, thunar in xfce, and any other split view file manager i used (like xplorer2, xfe).

in UI it is difficult to say something is "wrong" - but i am surprised someone could find that "logical":

- You are is split view mode, focus on a particular folder.
- you want to end the split view, hit F3, and you end up beiing in the folder that hasn't the focus (in effect the one you want to remove). logical really?
- it means ie that hitting F3 twice drive dolphin to loose the current folder

i never saw any UI behavior changing what is focused as a side effect. it is not usual.

I don't want to argue, if there is no configuration (what I like about KDE is that eveything is so configurable), I am even ready to rebuild the whole dolphin binary if someone shows me how to patch the source code in order to stay in the focused folder when I close the split view.

In the beginning I felt that I would get used to it. after a year I still have to stop & think before closing split mode. This is a daily annoyance I would love to get rid of.

thanks

I wanted to check the behaviors in other file managers, but I seem to be running older versions of them (namely thunar, pcmanfm) which don't do split views. I think it worthwhile to be consistent with other file managers, though to be fair dolphin's splitting behavior predates most other FM's splitting behavior (except of course konqueror which dolphin inherited from and maybe nautilus, maybe a couple others). Perhaps they considered dolphin's behavior and decided to go the other way, and in the meantime dolphin never considered changing.

As dolphin was created by taking the file-manager portion of konqueror and turning it into a file manager, the F3-means-close-current-view behavior made sense and matches the Ctrl+W-to-close-current-tab behavior that most browsers and other tabbed apps (like dolphin and most other file managers) support. On the other hand since dolphin explicitly only supports 1 or 2 view panes (abandoning konqueror's infinitely-splittable view panes) I can see your point about F3 meaning toggle split view, in which case it would also make sense when toggling the split closed to close the inactive pane.

Though currently (well, the KDE 4 version at least, though I wouldn't expect this to have changed in KDE 5) when you hit F3 the first time it immediately switches focus to the new pane (which makes sense to me as when you open something you usually want to interact with it immediately without having to hit another key sequence to switch to it), so then hitting F3 a second time will close the newly-created view and bring you right back to where you started. If the behavior for the toggle-close function were switched to close the other then hitting F3 twice in-a-row would end up replacing the original view with the second (which would at least be in the same location as the first, but losing selections or expanded folders that you might have had in the original view). Again I don't have the right versions of other file managers readily available to compare against.

Now, I don't mean to suggest that dolphin shouldn't change, I could well see an option to change that toggle-split behavior. I'm just pointing out some things to consider.

Thanks for the answer.

you can test this in recent versions of each WM in example by using Arch based distro (namely Antergos, or Manjaro).
Also, nothing prevents to use Thunar or Nemo in Plasma (in fact I use Nemo often). I am a happy user of Plasma v5.12.3 on Antergos.

You are right about the behavior: Frst F3 immediately switches focus to the new pane. I find it right.
You also are right my example was wrong. if you hit F3 twice you end up in same location unless you changed it.

If i try to post a change request, do you think there would be any chance to get it considered?
I would rather patch & rebuild it myself if the source code was'nt so big.

nadir wrote:Thanks for the answer.
If i try to post a change request, do you think there would be any chance to get it considered?
I would rather patch & rebuild it myself if the source code was'nt so big.

Patch done, based on Dolphin 18.08.1.

A version of Dolphin available in Arch AUR :

https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/dolphin-split-view-the-right-way/

Source code:
https://github.com/boussou/dolphin-split-view-the-right-way


I hope one day the KDE team will accept to add the feature (giving choice to users)

As a way of coping with this problem, there is an option is Settings > Configure Dolphin… > General to use Tab to switch focus before pressing F3 to close the focused pane.

In newer versions (plasma 5.18.5 and above), beside the above option, the option to chose which pane to close has been implemented: the behaviour can be changed (to "F3-closes-inactive-pane") by un-ticking the option Turning off split view closes active pane.