I don't know if this is the right place to post this, but I believe that KDE5 should have a new and better archive manager than Ark.

While KDE has some great applications, Ark, at least to me, has always been the weakest.

Here are some things that Ark lacks:

• Viewing options. There is only one very specific way to view files with Ark, a tree list style. With so many other KDE applications being extremely customizable, why doesn't this have a view menu.
  
• Internal viewers only. I get that might load things faster, but to have files open exclusively with the internal viewer is ludicrous.
  
• No right clicking. This limits what users can do. It's much easier to right click and say "extract this file", than to left click and go to the toolbar.
  
• Poor extraction. When you drag and drop a file from Ark to Dolphin, it keeps the folder path. This should be an option rather than forced.

I propose we implement something with the power of peazip or b1 for KDE. I believe it should have an interface similar to when you tell Dolphin to open zip files as folders. This interface would provide a much more user friendly, yet powerful interface. Since Dolphin treats the archive as a folder, it gives the user the most options when managing files in archives. Unfortunately, I don't have any coding experience, so I honestly don't know if this could be done. Then again, it's just an idea.

Or how about just opening folders inside Dolphin by default? I mean, it's just a file with other files in it, so a file manager should be the ideal tool for working with it. And Dolphin does the job very well if you let it.

Yes, Ark needs some love. And I agree with all of your points. But we must not always throw away unmaintained programs and start from scratch. For instance, the integration works in Krusader although not in all cases.

colomar wrote:Or how about just opening folders inside Dolphin by default? I mean, it's just a file with other files in it, so a file manager should be the ideal tool for working with it. And Dolphin does the job very well if you let it.

Dolphin lacks two abilities, a dedicated archive creation system, and the ability to open all archive formats as folders. To be precise, it cannot open RAR and 7z files.

Hunter Nightblood wrote:Dolphin lacks two abilities, a dedicated archive creation system, and the ability to open all archive formats as folders. To be precise, it cannot open RAR and 7z files.

My stance on archive creation: The basic case "Take these files and put them in an archive" already works from within Dolphin. What does not work is advanced options such as setting password protection or picking a different compression rate. For these advanced things, having a dedicated application does make sense. However, the archive creation GUI is not what your criticism of Ark was about, is it?

As for the RAR and 7z archives: Maybe that's just because nobody wrote a KIOslave for that yet, but maybe it's technically impossible. We'd have to ask some devs about that.

colomar wrote:What does not work is advanced options such as setting password protection or picking a different compression rate. For these advanced things, having a dedicated application does make sense.

Why?

I'm genuinely wondering. I haven't made up my mind yet whether I prefer archiving tools to be their own applications or integrated with the file manager.

veqz wrote:

colomar wrote:What does not work is advanced options such as setting password protection or picking a different compression rate. For these advanced things, having a dedicated application does make sense.

Why?

I'm genuinely wondering. I haven't made up my mind yet whether I prefer archiving tools to be their own applications or integrated with the file manager.

If we can integrate these features into the Dolphin UI in a way that they do not bother people who are not currently creating an archive, then yes, maybe it can be integrated.

After some thought, here's my take:

Right now, for archiving viewing and extracting, Dolphin will suit you just fine unless you want an external viewing application. I've been relying on the "Extract Here Autodetect subfolder" for a while now.

For archive creation, especially if you are going for compression, then it is needed to have an external application with a more advanced interface.

Now, some people will want an external archive viewing app for both creation and extraction. For KDE, right now Ark is the best choice followed by b1. The idea here is to unify the archive creation capabilities of Ark with the viewing interface of Dolphin into one powerful program.

I don't know coding, so I can't tell if we can still use some of the code for Ark. Ark, or at least one of its backends, had a nice feature where it opened tar.gz files in the folder part (opening both the tar and the gz file). Other archivers like Peazip and b1 require you to extract the tar file in order to view the actual archive. Features like this should be kept.

Please note that Ark is actively maintained, so it may be better to discuss some of these changes with the maintainer.

Hunter Nightblood wrote:I don't know if this is the right place to post this, but I believe that KDE5 should have a new and better archive manager than Ark.

While KDE has some great applications, Ark, at least to me, has always been the weakest.

Here are some things that Ark lacks:

• Viewing options. There is only one very specific way to view files with Ark, a tree list style. With so many other KDE applications being extremely customizable, why doesn't this have a view menu.

This is something doable. Feel free to open a feature request on bugs.kde.org.

• Internal viewers only. I get that might load things faster, but to have files open exclusively with the internal viewer is ludicrous.
  
• No right clicking. This limits what users can do. It's much easier to right click and say "extract this file", than to left click and go to the toolbar.

I recently added these two features to Ark, if someone missed it. Enjoy them!

• Poor extraction. When you drag and drop a file from Ark to Dolphin, it keeps the folder path. This should be an option rather than forced.

This makes sense and there is also some thoughts about how to implement it: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=208384
One of the next goals I have for Ark is a proper Settings Dialog, as you would expect from a KDE app.

If I may suggest something : it would be great to have multiple selection and extraction. What I mean is : currently if I select more than one files in an archive, and try to drag and drop them to a Dolphin window for extraction, only the last file selected is extracted. It would be nice if Ark extracted all the selected files.

What ever happened to the changes listed in this blog post? http://lamarque-lvs.blogspot.com/2013/06/my-work-in-basyskom.html

I like how simple dealing with archives is in Mac OSX. Just open the archive and it is automatically extracted into one subfolder and opened for the user. Which is exactly what most people do with archives: extract and open them. The archive is not automatically deleted but users know how to delete a single file anyways. Perhaps, Dolphin could go to a similar route? It's not like it would be impossible thanks to the KArchive Framework. Actually, I would think the files are extracted somewhere when an archive is viewed in Ark; so I doubt this would be a big change.

CTown wrote:I like how simple dealing with archives is in Mac OSX...

I would hate this behavior. When I load a compressed file from the web it is usually placed at /tmp often using a 'hash' name, and would be extracted into /tmp/8s7fzes87fr/ by Ark. Much better fitting to my workflow is Krusader's (or rather kio?) krarc: the archive is virtually opened at its place letting me decide what to do with the content and where to place the selected files.

elvisangelaccio wrote:

Hunter Nightblood wrote:I don't know if this is the right place to post this, but I believe that KDE5 should have a new and better archive manager than Ark.

While KDE has some great applications, Ark, at least to me, has always been the weakest.

Here are some things that Ark lacks:

• Viewing options. There is only one very specific way to view files with Ark, a tree list style. With so many other KDE applications being extremely customizable, why doesn't this have a view menu.

This is something doable. Feel free to open a feature request on bugs.kde.org.

As this is a biggie for me I opened a feature request https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=342693

update: appears there was an existing bug request https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=139510