Plasma is an excellent workspace all-in-all, but there was one feature that stood out amongst all others in originality, niftyness and usability.

• It was maybe even the coolest feature in the whole of of today's desktop world.
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• It made me proud to show my KDE desktop to Windows or Mac users and tell them "here, look, see what it can do"...
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• It made navigating to specific files on my hard drive as QUICK, COMFORTABLE and FUN as it had NEVER been before.

Now, with the KDE 4.5 release, it's suddenly GONE.
For no apparent reason.
Replaced by a stupid little click-able icon, that in no way preserves the original smoothness, usability and comfortableness of the original feature.

All I'd like to know is:

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PS: As most likely everyone who's used both KDE 4.4 and KDE 4.5 has figured out by now, the feature I'm mourning is of course the tremendously slick zero-click-folder-navigation in plasma folder views.

WTF?

It works in KDE 4.5.

Really?

Hovering the mouse over a folder icon to open a "floating" box of the folder's contents, without having to click anything, still works for you in KDE 4.5?

Does that mean there's an option somewhere to turn this on/off (which maybe my distro has set to off by default in 4.5) which I just haven't found yet?

Short answer: because many people complained about it ruining their workflows ("the stupid popup always gets in my way").
I would guess that there are more people (myself included) who really liked that feature of plasma than who were annoyed by the popup getting in the way.
IMO would be better to have an on-off switch in the config for the plasmoid than to have replaced the behavior with a little icon that you have to click (which being little makes it very difficult to hit, therefore twice as inefficient - one for making you click, one for making the target tiny).

Using the hover-popup to navigate to deep directories was very fast/efficient, especially when you only need to take one action on something in that deep-nested folder.

airdrik wrote:Short answer: because many people complained about it ruining their workflows ("the stupid popup always gets in my way").

I see...

airdrik wrote:I would guess that there are more people (myself included) who really liked that feature of plasma than who were annoyed by the popup getting in the way.
IMO would be better to have an on-off switch in the config for the plasmoid than to have replaced the behavior with a little icon that you have to click

Yes, I think this is really one of those cases where a config option would make sense...

airdrik wrote:Using the hover-popup to navigate to deep directories was very fast/efficient, especially when you only need to take one action on something in that deep-nested folder.

Especially so when using a laptop touch pad instead of a mouse, where moving the mouse pointer to a very precise location an then tapping is MUCH less comfortable and much slower then just moving the pointer on top of a relatively large icon!

Well, I hope the devs will bring this feature back in a future release, if only as an opt-in...

In any case, thanks for the explanation!

airdrik wrote:Short answer: because many people complained about it ruining their workflows ("the stupid popup always gets in my way").
I would guess that there are more people (myself included) who really liked that feature of plasma than who were annoyed by the popup getting in the way.
IMO would be better to have an on-off switch in the config for the plasmoid than to have replaced the behavior with a little icon that you have to click (which being little makes it very difficult to hit, therefore twice as inefficient - one for making you click, one for making the target tiny).

Using the hover-popup to navigate to deep directories was very fast/efficient, especially when you only need to take one action on something in that deep-nested folder.

As one of those who complained, I must agree with several of your points. I think those of us who wished to see the previews go away wished for an option to do so, not this wholesale change. Now, deeply nested directories are a pain to get to. Someone wish to file a bugreport?

"IMO would be better to have an on-off switch in the config for the plasmoid than to have replaced the behavior with a little icon that you have to click"

i'm completely open to such patches. i'd even like to see a patch that made it so only the _first_ folder needed to be opened this way with the views in the subsequent popups all triggered on hover.

the person who worked on the click-to-popup icons did so to resolve an issue that many were running into, which had no solution and which was quite nearly ruining the entire experience for too many people. now, thanks to their efforts, we have a solution for those people. how nice is that? (those that complained just as bitterly and tastelessly as the original post in this thread probably think it's terrific.) now, the next step is to make it possible to re-enable the on-hover trigger and to make drilling deeper on-hover by default.

btw, i do find the over the top hystrionics in this thread to be pretty distasteful. it's a shameful and counterproductive aspect of the f/oss culture these days. we have limited man-power, 6 month dev cycles and expectations of perfection to meet: complete stability with tons of new features and innovation in every release, every 6 months, or face the wrath of eight character high "WHY"s from the never happy "fans". impossible.

aseigo wrote:i'm completely open to such patches. i'd even like to see a patch that made it so only the _first_ folder needed to be opened this way with the views in the subsequent popups all triggered on hover.

That might indeed be a compromise that everyone could be happy with. (Maybe an on/off switch won't even be necessary then?)

So, would opening a feature request on bugs.kde.org be appropriate for this so it doesn't get lost?

aseigo wrote:btw, i do find the over the top hystrionics in this thread to be pretty distasteful. it's a shameful and counterproductive aspect of the f/oss culture these days. we have limited man-power, 6 month dev cycles and expectations of perfection to meet: complete stability with tons of new features and innovation in every release, every 6 months, or face the wrath of eight character high "WHY"s from the never happy "fans". impossible.

Sure, my post was histrionic (possibly even overly so), but maybe you're overreacting here as well.
Emotiveness and character art aside, my post was still an honest question, not a rhetorical complaint.
I wasn't ranting about the quality of the developer's work, either, but expressing my confusion about what appeared to me an arbitrary design decision to drop an already existing feature.

Before airdrik explained it to me in his reply above, I had no idea the popups had been getting in the way of some people's workflows.
(Among my personal friends and acquaintances who use KDE, I can think from the top of my head of at least two other people who I know also really appreciated this feature in KDE 4.4, but no one whom I remember complaining about it.)

aseigo wrote:the person who worked on the click-to-popup icons did so to resolve an issue that many were running into, which had no solution and which was quite nearly ruining the entire experience for too many people. now, thanks to their efforts, we have a solution for those people. how nice is that?

Yes, it is indeed very nice that KDE developers take user request into account.

Also, I realise it's not the developer's fault that they usually hear only from those users who want something changed, and not from those who prefer it as it is (that's just a law of nature, or should I say "law of bugtracker").
(In order to detect "many love it - many hate it" cases such as this, it might make sense if developers, before changing UI behaviour in favour of bugs.kde.org user requests, tell those users to open up a KDE Brainstorm poll first and see how it turns out?)

aseigo wrote:now, the next step is to make it possible to re-enable the on-hover trigger and to make drilling deeper on-hover by default.

Sounds great!

uetsah wrote:I wasn't ranting about the quality of the developer's work, either, but expressing my confusion about what appeared to me an arbitrary design decision to drop an already existing feature.

Perhaps you should have waited to hear the reason before going off on a tirade (or better yet skip the tirade completely).

There are different ways to word a question. One approach it to post a calm, easy-to-understand question. Another approach is to post a hysterical rant where the actual question isn't even mentioned until a "P.S.". Yet another approach would be to search the forums to see if the subject had already been discussed (which it has). The third approach is generally considered the best on these forums, the second is highly discouraged under all circumstances.

It's one feature that you would like to turn off sometimes, and turn back on later.