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Currently we can start typing when item is focused inside a folder and current selection will start going through the list as we type. I propose to improve this behaviour.

Proposition is this: when we start typing dolphin should mark our typed substring in every item by setting background of substring to different color. Using arrows should change current selected item only between items that have a marked substring. Substring matching should not be anchored to beginning of a string. Current substring used for filtering could be displayed somewhere. Maybe similar to how chrome displays loading status at bottom of the page.

This would greatly ease navigation inside folders with many items, especially whey they have a common prefix.

Have you tried using the filter bar (ctrl+i)? It allows you to do substring filtering on files in the open view (doesn't do the highlighting part you mention, which could be nice), which is much nicer when searching through 100s or 1000s of files as you don't need to scroll very far to see the list of matched files.