I'm trying to figure out why Dolphin behaves the way it does wrt view modes when you have 'remember view mode for each folder' selected.

I prefer the Icons view as my default view mode. Then for each folder where I want a view mode other than that one, I can manually select it. This is all well and good. However, sometimes Dolphin decides that Icons is not my default view mode any more, and folders that I have not explicitly set a view mode start using some other view mode, e.g. Details.

This is incredibly annoying, and I can't detect any pattern as to why it does this. I would dearly love to have a setting that I can specify what the default view mode shall be, and it shall not be overridden by Dolphin unless I manually override it.

There isn't a default view setting that I could find in Dolphin on Trunk.

As far as I know, Dolphin keeps the same view until it is forced to be changed by another directories preference. That new view will be kept until manually changed by the user or it encounters another directories preference.

Yes... it has some (hard to understand) rules about when it changes the default view. It does remember the setting internally somehow, because apparently the last view you had before you close Dolphin will be the one it uses next time you start it.

But again, giving the user the option to force a specific view as the default seems reasonable, easy to implement and gives more flexibility to an excellent file manager. I'd implement it myself if I thought I had any chance of getting the patch included...

I would recommend contacting its maintainer ( ppenz on Freenode ) and asking him if he would accept the feature.

I got in touch with the developer of Dolphin. He explained that you can reset the default mode in View->Adjust View Properties. There is a checkbox labelled "Use as default for new folders" - this is actually the option to reset the default view for folders that haven't been visited before or have no specific view settings already applied to them.