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Hi!

This is actually a pretty simple idea but very hard to describe. I'll do my best.

Almost any KDE application dealing with files has a "File" menu. However, nowhere in this menu we get easy access to the file itself. I propose to add a draggable reference to the physical file (notice the first entry in the file menu):


A lot of things work really easy in KDE if you use drag & drop. However, more often than not when I decide to do something with a file which could be easily accomplished using drag & drop, I am actually "using" the file rather than looking at its physical representation in dolphin. So I have to manually launch dolphin and navigate to the directory where the file is stored.

Imagine the following use-case:
You look at the photos from your summer vacation with gwenview. You find a picture you like and just drag it from the file handle to the desktop where plasma will ask you if you want to add it as a picture-frame or set it as your background (ok the background thing is not implemented so far but afaik someone is already working on it).

Or: You are looking for a price-list of something on the internet. You stumble upon a pdf document which is automatically opened in okular (or it's kpart if you use konqueror). You want to save it on your thumb-drive so you plug it in, and plasma automatically pops up the "new device" plasmoid.
You click on the thumb drive which automatically opens dolphin. To copy the document you just drag it from the file handle in okulars file-dialog to dolphin.

I could easily find a lot of other use-cases but I guess you can think of even more.

Technically I guess it shouldn't be that hard, but as menu items are not meant to be dragged I guess there might be some issues there.

Looking forward to hearing some feedback!

Greetings,
bedahr

Uhoh! Your image seems to have broken.

Draggable menu-items or icons or something like that - okay.
But integration of opened files in the device-notifier? Does not sound useful.

The suggestion isn't integrating the device-notifier, that's just an extra detail in the example (which is you have the file open and want to save it somewhere by just dragging a handle to a filemanager which is open to the directory you want to save to).

Other possible use cases for web developers: you have an html document open in kate and want to preview the file in konqueror (or other browser) - just drag the handle to the browser's app launcher and it opens to the file. You're browsing through your pics in gwenview and want to send some to your friend with whom you are chatting using kopete... You want to e-mail the latest document you are editing in koffice to a coworker... etc.

I don't know how well the draggable menu item would work ('dragging' in menus generally implies that you are browsing through sub-menus or otherwise haven't decided what menu item you want). One alternative would be for a draggable toolbar item (labeled something like drag-to-copy or drag-to-send). A variation on that would be to have the save button draggable.

I like this idea as it lends itself toward a more integrated and cohesive desktop - less digging through files to find the one you have open, no need to save that pdf you just opened on download (to make sure it was the right one) only to turn around and e-mail it and delete it.

This would save a tremendous amount of time in most task requiring any sort of editor, I am amazed no one thought of it before.
In fact this should be a standard and not just KDE.

It could be great to have file -> select menu entry. Once user click on it, application will display dolphin(window looking like it) window and operates on it(listen for select/unselect, etc. operations).

For web pages it could be:
- Whole page(folder contains all related files)
- Images
- Important pieces of text
- etc.

User(instead) using D&D can simple copy.