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Does anybody remember this picture? It was originally a Gnome mockup, but it was posted to KDE-looks about two years ago.



I think the mockup is pretty self-explaining: if two adjacent items are selected, their selection are joined as shown.

More information

Rafael Fern??ndez L??pez actually implanted this, see this (real) screenshot. You can also read more about it in his blog.
One year ago I asked him what had happened to it, and his answer was:

Rafael Fern??ndez L??pez wrote:About the item-joining stuff, it was just a proof of concept, more something
like "it was doable". At this moment (with no items evenly sized) this would
look just horrible. There are other problems, on the hack I did there, I hacked
directly Qt, and now I could hack KCategorizedView for this purpose, but there
is a problem: it would look somehow inconsistent, because some apps use
QListView, and it wouldn't be able to join items.

Well, I still want this feature as I think it looks great. What about you?

I personally love this idea. I'm a **** for the little touches that make the system that much more refined.

Granted, I don't know how it would work under certain conditions; Ie if Plasma used this without locking icons to grid, or several icons were just slightly spread out/misplaced, would we use this effect or fall back to the regular non-joining model?

Hah, nice to see this bumped - I had almost forgotten that I posted it here.

Kver wrote:
Granted, I don't know how it would work under certain conditions; Ie if Plasma used this without locking icons to grid, or several icons were just slightly spread out/misplaced, would we use this effect or fall back to the regular non-joining model?

If the selected items are separated, the selection won't be joined. Not sure how it would work with icons that aren't arranged in a grid, however.

This is a nice idea, it is more natural to see this in the selection. Also with touch screens, it is easier/faster to realize that the action is made.

With icons not in a grid, I think it would be fine to fall back to the old selection view. Otherwise it'll just be too complicated. A workable solution is to have a "metaball" like selection but that's just overkill.