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The file management software is one of the most important components of a desktop environment. Since every user uses it, it is also responsible for a large part of the user experience. However, depending on the technical background of the user he/she might have completely different needs from a file management software. To keep the user interface clean but still to be able to fulfill the needs of the individual user a plugin system for dolphin would be a viable option. The success of the firefox extension system speaks for itself.

However, integrating a complete Firefox-like extension system into the existing dolphin would be infeasible. But for the start there could be a small subset of dolphins functionality which could be customized by plugins, for example: plugins can decide to put overlay icons above the icons displayed by dolphin.

Use cases:
1.) Jeff is a developer and would like to have a small overlay over his file icons, so that he can easily see, which files he has changed since his last SVN checkout.

2.) April is an FTP admin and has to deal with a lot of data. She would like to have an overlay over her file icons, indicating which files have a corrupt MD5 value and which ones are OK.

3.) Tom has a lot of files that don't offer file extensions. He only wants to use the analysis results from 'file' and wants to store this analysis data in meta files.

4.) Tina is a web developer and wants user interface elements allowing for an easy and comfortable synchronized browsing experience, i.e. Left Panel is a local folder, right panel holds an FTP folder. Both panels show the same folder hierarchy. Now if the user clicks on any folder in one panel, the other panel automatically also changes to that subfolder. (this use case is stolen from idea 61915)

3. Tom should write a small script an create a service-menu, that's simple.
4. Tina should use Konqueror

1.+2. Well, that could be real plugins for Dolphin-part.

I would especially love to see SVN (or other source control) integration in KDE's filemanager(s), with the overlay icons and a fully populated service-menu with things like update, commit, (check out), browse repo, diff repo vs. working using kompare (or kdiff3), etc.

At work on our WinXP machines, we use TortoiseSVN for SVN integration directly in windows explorer, and it really makes working with SVN a cinch.

Dolphin is the unflexible file-manager, Konqueror is the flexible file-manager. It would be useless to reimplement Konqueror-features in Dolphin. Dolphin is a part of Konqueror. When you want to use things like FTP, this part is not enough.

PS:
There are SVN-service-menus IIRC. If not, download the bzr-service-menus, modify them for SVN, that's it...

Okay, put this into ~/.kde(4)/share/kde4/services/ServiceMenus/svn.desktop, and you will have BZR-menus, try it for SVN:

Code: Select all

[Desktop Entry]<br />Type=Service<br />ServiceTypes=KonqPopupMenu/Plugin<br />MimeType=inode/directory;<br />Actions=add;qadd;commit;push;<br />X-KDE-Submenu=Bazaar<br /><br />[Desktop Action add]<br />Name=Bzr Add<br />Exec=bzr add<br />Icon=katomic <br /><br />[Desktop Action qadd]<br />Name=Bzr QAdd<br />Exec=~/.kde4/share/kde4/services/ServiceMenus/launch.sh %d bzr qadd "%f"<br />Icon=katomic<br /> <br />[Desktop Action commit]<br />Name=Bzr Commit<br />Exec=~/.kde4/share/kde4/services/ServiceMenus/launch.sh %d bzr qcommit "%f"<br />Icon=katomic<br /> <br />[Desktop Action push]<br />Name=Bzr Push<br />Exec=~/.kde4/share/kde4/services/ServiceMenus/launch.sh %d bzr qpush %f<br />Icon=katomic

launch.sh:

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#!/bin/bash<br /># From http://legroom.net/2007/04/20/adding-custom-actions-kde-context-menus<br /> <br /># enable support for spaces<br />IFS=$'\r\n'<br /> <br /># check for number of arguments<br />if [ "$2" = "" ]; then<br />echo "Usage: $0 <dir> <command>"<br /> exit 1<br />fi<br /> <br /># set directory and command<br />DIR=$1<br />shift<br />COM=$@<br /> <br /># execute command in xterm<br />cd $DIR<br />`$COM`<br />exit

PPS:
Don't forget kbuildsycoca4

4. Tina should use Konqueror

Does Konqueror allow same file hierarchy on different paths? As far I remember, linkin was limited for different viewstyles on same path.

So it would end up that left is as icons and right is as list but both show same /home/user/directory1/directory1_1/.

This suggest we would have possibility to mark one folder as "master" path and all sub-directories on there would be linked then.

Note that all these use cases should be for Konqueror, as Dolphin itself will not be integrating plugins ( although, these are needed for its KPart which may be permissible, although they will only be activated in Konqueror )

Kross is the answer and I'd love to see a krossified Dolphin in the near future.

You can theoretically write scripting-plugins for Konqueror. (Ruby, Python) You just have to write a PluginFactory for the language. But nobody has ever written a Konqueror-plugin in a scripting-language. (I failed trying)

Marked as submitted: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=237841