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This is an idea for the place panel in Dolphin, which lists places you want to visit often as well as removable media. Take a look at this mockup:



The thing to notice this time is the small arrow at the far right of the highlighted area. It is darker blue than the normal mouse-over highlighting because it has been clicked on by the user. If you click this arrow it pops up a menu, probably the same as the right-click menu but easier to find. From this menu you can unmount removable drives, empty the recycling bin, or open the place in a new folder or a new tab.

Also, it should display other programs that you can open it with. In the Plasma new device notifier, for certain sorts of devices you are given options to open the device in another program. So for instance you can open a DVD in Dragon Player or open a camera in Digikam. The menu you see in the mockup will display the same information, allowing you to open places directly in an appropriate program other than dolphin. The ability to do this should also be in the right-click menu, but with the arrow appearing to the side it should be obvious there is something you can do with the device besides just left-clicking on it. This goes back to discoverability, people should not have to right-click on everything to do stuff, if you can interact with something in anything other than the default, left-click manner this should be clear. That doesn't mean getting rid of the right-click menu, this just provides an alternative way to access it.

Note that despite using the word "actions", this has nothing to do with my actions panel idea. The actions here show up in a menu that appears right next to the button, as you can see in the mockup. They do not appear in the actions panel, which only reflects actions associated with the currently selected item or items in the file browser.


This is part of my series of Dolphin ideas

I don\'t think so. There needs to be a place to configure Places, but I would suggest that:

Settings -> Configure Places

would be best.

This is just the standard right-click actions for the particular place. It is simply an additional way to access the right-click menu.

Do we need an additional way? I think we should have either right click or hover, not both.

I should have said more. I am criticizing having the configuration options in the menus. This is not a criticism of your work, but just my comment that the configuration stuff shouldn\'t be there to stumble over every time you use Places -- it should be in a KCM dialog.

As I said in the description, I don\'t consider the right-click menus to be as easily discoverable as this menu. I think it is much more obvious that there is something you can do here. That being said, I don\'t see a reason to not keep the right-click menus for people who prefer them. They also would not be absolutely identical to the right-click menus. For instance it displays a list of applications you can use to open the place, like digikam for a memory card or k3b for a cd or dvd.

Issues regarding including configuration options in the right-click menu are outside the scope of this idea.