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The dolphin places bar is a very useful tool. It allows you to access commonly-used folders (including remote ones), as well as access, mount, unmount, and eject removable media. However, it only works in programs that are specifically coded to use the dolphin places bar or the dolphin breadcrumb bar. I think it would be very useful if there was a kio slave that allowed you access to your places, as well as allowing the full range of actions for places (mount, unmount, eject).

There are several advantages to this. First, it allows you to essentially treat your places a particular folder. You can make a shortcut to it in other folders, navigate up and down within the places, and easily navigate between places.

Second, you can easily use your places with the folderview plasmoid, quick access plasmoid, or any other application or plasmoid that supports kio does not have explicit support for dolphin's places. There is already a brainstorm idea about quickaccess support for places, this would solve that issue without any additional work by the developers of quickaccess. Using this with folderview or quickaccess would allow really easy access to commonly-used folders and removable media right on your desktop.

Finally, it would allow an easy "root" folder for other kio slaves that normally appear in the places bar. Currently there is no "move up one directory" action for kio slaves like trash and network that automatically appear in the places bar, and moving up in removable media moves you to your "media" folder. With the places kio slave, moving up from any of those (or perhaps from any kio slave) could send you to the places kio slave, where you could then navigate to another place.

I have to admit I'm not really a fan of this idea. I assume the extra (mount unmount etc) functions will only be available to folders when accessed through this special path - which already makes it different to a regular path or symlink. I don't see it cleanly integrating at the commandline level anyway and I would certainlly not want something similar to the MS windows "shortcut" abomination to pollute any unix.

Places are good and integrating a places panel with any file dialog is good but trying to simulate places in a filesystem has issues.

I'm not sure what the downside here is. If you don't want to use it, you don't have to. But it allows you to do things that you currently can't, like put your places in a folderview or quickaccess plasmoid.

And no, it wouldn't integrate into the commandline any more than any other kio slaves or the existing places panel do.

This wouldn't be the default Dolphin view, it would simply be another kio slave used to access a specialized function.

Hmmm.. I think I might have got the wrong impression om re-read... sorry 'bout that.