Hi all,

I noticed a change in the way keyboard navigation works in Dolphin when using a key or a phrase to find a particular entry. It used to work like this: I typed a character or a combination of characters and Dolphin would select the first entry beginning with the characters that i typed. If I would repeat the same characters it would select the next entry starting from the currently selected entry and so on. For example, if I would have many files starting with “k” and I would type the key “k” many times it would iterate over the files. Now, with the new behavior, it seems Dolphin selects the first entry every time I type and it doesn’t continue search at the currently selected entry like it used to.

Unfortunately, I can’t tell the moment when this changed, but I remember having used it like this not too long ago. I just wonder whether this is a configuration problem on my system, a bug, or an intentional change.

A bit about my configuration: I’m using Dolphin 19.12.0 with KDE Frameworks 5.65.0 and Qt 5.14.0 on Gentoo Linux.

Is there someone with similar experience or knowledge about the change?

Update 2: The “wrong” behavior only shows my desktop machine and on my laptop, but it only applies to the multiple character case. Searching by typing a single character still works.

I'm using Dolphin 17.12.3 with KDE Frameworks 5.47.0 and Qt 5.9.5 on Kubuntu 18.04.

hmm.. the behavior seems a little fiddly. When I search by just a single letter, it will recognize repeats and cycle through the entries which start with that letter; however if I type multiple letters while it does match the first/next file which starts with those letters, I can't get it to cycle through only those files which start with those letters, only those files which start with the first letter (after sufficient timeout that it decides that I'm no longer typing more letters in the prefix).

Of course, if there are sufficient entries that I'm searching for stuff that starts with some string then I'll pop open the filter bar using Ctrl+i, and type my substring in there. Granted this takes a couple more steps over just typing from wherever, but it avoids the fiddliness of trying to find things by typing blindly.