I am now moving to KDE after years of using gnome. My first impressions are very good but there a few things about dolphin that bother me:

1. Generate thumbnails automatically when I open a folder. Now I have to click generate the thumbnails button for dolphin to create thumbnails. (Yes, "show previews for ..." in the dolphin settings are ticked.)

2. Stop dolphin from showing the number of items in folders in the details view mode. It slows things down in a big hierachy of folders and files.

3. This is the most annoying one and a bit hard to explain. When you select a file in dolphin and press (say) b then e then dolphin first shows items starting with b and immediately jumps to items starting with e. What I rather want is dolphin to jump to items starting with 'be'. This is the default behavior in nautilus and some other programs I use. It makes selecting the file I am looking for in a large folder much faster. Is there a way to change dolphin behaviour accordingly?

I am using Kubuntu 11.10 by the way.

Any help appreciated.

1) Dolphin -> view -> previews. Personally I've turned this off because on folders with large number of files it's a bit cpu intensive, especially with external drives. Question: where's the "generate the thumbnails" button?

2) Don't think so but think this is a valid idea that you could post in the Brainstorm forum viewforum.php?f=83. How large is your directories that in the detailed view the number of items in folders causes a slow down? FYI there are improved performance enhancement for Dolphin in 4.8 http://ppenz.blogspot.com/2011/08/intro ... in-20.html

3) Agin don't think so but try the filter bar: Dolphin -> Tools -> Show filter bar. And again you could post this in Brainstorm.

For 3., it already works that way, you just need to type faster. There's no textbox like in Nautilus though (there's an idea for this in Brainstorm).

Hans wrote:For 3., it already works that way, you just need to type faster. <snip>

Old fingers = slow fingers, thanks for reminding (and enlightening) me

what's the "textbox" in Nautilus and how is it different then Dolphin's filter bar?

It looks like this (probably old screenshot, just something I found with Google): http://files.myopera.com/Jzarecta/blog/nautilus.png

Basically you see what you type and can type however slowly as you want, but if you change your mind you have to clear the textbox first (e.g. Ctrl+Backspace or Escape).

With regards to the "Generate the previews" button - they'll be referring to the entry in the Dolphin toolbar labeled "Preview" (which can be either depressed or raised - depending on if it is enabled or disabled respectively).

Thank you all for your quick and very helpful responses. I consider 1 & 3 to be solved and I'll post in the Brainstorm forums about 2.

Cheers.

Hans wrote:For 3., it already works that way, you just need to type faster.

whether it can somehow slow down need for typing speed?
regards

erngab wrote:

Hans wrote:For 3., it already works that way, you just need to type faster.

whether it can somehow slow down need for typing speed?
regards

As far as I know it can't be configured.

Hans wrote:For 3., it already works that way, you just need to type faster. There's no textbox like in Nautilus though (there's an idea for this in Brainstorm).

This discussion here made me try it myself and look into the "keyboard search" code. It seems that the maximal delay between two keypresses before the search is cancelled is really too short to make multi-letter searches useful

After some discussion on the kfm-devel list [1], we decided to increase the timeout to 5 seconds in KDE 4.8.2. We also think that some kind of visual feedback (like in Nautilus) would be nice, but I can't say when it will be implemented - there's just too many things on our TODO-lists It's probably a job for someone who knows Dolphin's code really well though - if someone here wants to help out with coding, it might be better to start with something simpler.

[1] http://lists.kde.org/?t=133287239100001&r=1&w=2

freininghaus wrote:After some discussion on the kfm-devel list [1], we decided to increase the timeout to 5 seconds in KDE 4.8.2.

Nice. I also found the timeout to be a bit to short and started to use the filter bar mainly. That said, do you plan to make the timeout interval configurable? I guess the period which feels comfortable really depends on the individual user, e.g. see the "old fingers" comment from google01103 above.

HmpfCBR wrote:

freininghaus wrote:After some discussion on the kfm-devel list [1], we decided to increase the timeout to 5 seconds in KDE 4.8.2.

Nice. I also found the timeout to be a bit to short and started to use the filter bar mainly. That said, do you plan to make the timeout interval configurable? I guess the period which feels comfortable really depends on the individual user, e.g. see the "old fingers" comment from google01103 above.

There are no plans to make the timeout configurable, although it seems that the best value is really different for every user (we got some feedback already about the new timeout being too long from some people). The problem is that using the program may get more confusing the more configuration options there are. This is why one should only add new options if there is a very good reason for it.

Concerning keyboard search, I think the best way to improve the current situation is to provide some visual feedback about the search string.

freininghaus wrote:The problem is that using the program may get more confusing the more configuration options there are. This is why one should only add new options if there is a very good reason for it.

I agree, maybe a hidden configuration via dolphinrc then?

Another approach would be and I am just thinking aloud now: There are probably also some delays for user input in other parts of the workspace, e.g. krunner? If so, one could argue, that something like 'term input delay/input responsiveness' is not only affecting dolphin but the whole workspace, so it could be a option in "systemsettings -> devices -> keyboard".

HmpfCBR wrote:I agree, maybe a hidden configuration via dolphinrc then?

I don't think that a hidden option makes the situation much better. Most users who might be interested in the option wouldn't even know that it exists. Moreover, quite a bit of code would be needed to handle the option even if there was no GUI for it.

HmpfCBR wrote:Another approach would be and I am just thinking aloud now: There are probably also some delays for user input in other parts of the workspace, e.g. krunner? If so, one could argue, that something like 'term input delay/input responsiveness' is not only affecting dolphin but the whole workspace, so it could be a option in "systemsettings -> devices -> keyboard".

It seems that KRunner (I mean the dialog that opens on Alt+F2) is not closed automatically if the user does not press a key for a certain time. But if there really are other places in KDE where similar functionality is provided (I'm not aware of any at the moment), I agree that it might be worth making the timeout a global setting.