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In the Dolphin mockup below, on the left side of each group is a small arrow:



Clicking this arrow will cause the group to collapse, hiding its contents (although the label will still be there as will the count). To prevent people from getting confused the group should undergo a pretty drastic graphical change to make it obvious it is not just an empty group (which I know is impossible, but it might still confuse some people). Clicking the arrow again makes the group visible. This is particularly useful if you have a large number of files and you want to hide some of them, you can use a filter but that requires you typing something in. This just requires a single mouse click. Vista has this as well but I came up with it on my own.



This is part of my series of Dolphin ideas

As an user of both vista/win7 and linux/kde system, after discovering that dolphin have group view functionality, i was really surprised and annoyed to discover that it's not possible to collapse groups.
Under win7 collapsed groups are remembered per folder, which creates kind of sticky filtering, while it's still possible to see whats actually in folder.
Also clicking on header selects all files in group.

I would really love to see this implemented, it may look like small feature but for me this become essential while managing folders with big amount of different types of files

Great idea !

I don't see how it can hurt to manipulate shown/hidden groups like this. This gets my vote.

I know this is planned, it is even mentioned in the source code for the relevant kde library.