Hi!

Is it possible to sort folders and files in Dolphin case sensitive? I would like to sort like it was default in KDE3's Konqueror and in Linux in general, that is all folders starting with capital letter first.

Now I have folders sorted like this: aa, Aaa, BBB, bc, Cc.
I would like to have them listed: Aaa, BBB, Cc, aa, bc.

Thanks in advance!

That doesn't appear to be an option. There is already a bug report about it: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=148550

Might I ask why you want it this way, though? What is the advantage to this method of sorting?

Years of using terminal and old KDE... and because case-sensitive is the natural way of sorting in Linux (and natural I mean like 'ls -1')

I've switched to KDE4 (from KDE3) just yesterday and I'm surprised that one can't sort files the unix way... I have folders with thousands of files and I have a problem going through them now because they are not sorted 'properly'...

BTW, I've noticed another annoying (for me) difference with KDE3. When I delete a file (icon) from a 'middle' of directory in Dolphin, rest of the icons get automatically adjusted. In KDE3's Konqueror after deleting an icon there were a gap left until I hit refresh (F5). Can this behavior be enforced in KDE4's Dolphin?

No, that isn't possible, in fact it is unlikely it would be possible without changing the underlying Qt libraries. Dolphin does not actually handle the displaying of files, this is handled by Qt.

So, how it worked in KDE3 Konqueror?

Qt has undergone some massive changes from the Qt 3 used by KDE 3 and the Qt 4 used by KDE 4.

Just curious - can you please explain how this works "in Linux in general"? I tried ls, ls -l and ls -1 and they all sorted it like Dolphin (not case sensitive).

Looks like it is case-insensitive for me as well

I'm on Slackware and for me 'ls -1' (number one not letter l, meaning in one column) is case sensitive. On Linux sorting of files depends on LC_COLLATE system locale. I think that LC_COLLATE=C is the default but some distros change it to something like LC_COLLATE=en_US for some reason...

You can do a little experiment in terminal:

Code: Select all

$ mkdir test_collate
$ cd test_collate
$ touch aa
$ touch AA
$ echo $LC_COLLATE  [shows LC_COLLATE locale for your shell]
$ ls -1 [lists accordingly to above]
$ export LC_COLLATE=C
$ ls -1 [lists case sensitive]
$ export LC_COLLATE=en_US
$ ls -1 [lists case insensitive]

For some reason Dolphin (or Qt4) doesn't respect this system wide setting...

Thanks for the answer. I found this regarding my distro: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Co ... #Collation

I personally don't think this should be another option in Dolphin or System Settings, but following the system wide settings makes sense to me (from the little knowledge I have).

Maybe someone know at what point the setting of LC_COLLATE is lost? Is it that KDE4 sets it to match it's language settings or Dolphin doesn't respect locales at all, or is it at Qt level?

Your best bet is to submit a bug report about it.

This has really annoyed me also, that I cannot get case sensitive ordering. Nautilus seems to respect the LC_COLLATE settings, and Thunar I think has a special (maybe hidden config) option to do it. Only Dolphin fails at this.

There is already a "natural ordering" flag in Dolphin, and I seem to recall that the Qt Dir sort & filtering core code is done through a virtual. Surely someone should be able create a derived class/virtual method override that uses strcoll to do order by collation?

I do not know if Dolphin's code is still Model <-> View based, but if it is, then the sort order is largely provided by the Model, and yes it can be customised by applications.