09 August, 2012

Dolphin immediately useful

Like many, I read this already famous blog post about the stripped-down Nautilus with growing surprise. I won't go into what I think it's wrong with it as others have said enough already. I'd like to focus on the positive: the very first point made.

Immediately useful

Mccan describes how Nautilus should be immediately useful upon starting. This is accomplished by showing recent files instead of the home folder of the user. A very neath idea, actually - I always have all my files sorted on date (newest on top) and most of the time that means I just have to click on the top-left of the file view in a folder to get what I want. But I first have to go to the right folder... So I'd say - awesome idea.

I also realized this is extremely easy to have in dolphin due to the Nepomuk 'timeline' KIOslave. This shows you a calendar of your active files per date. The screen shot below shows this - yes, I use the split function to show both the files and the dates, I hope it is not confusing ;-)


And of course, the timeline has a vitual 'today' folder which basically shows you all files you touched today. Drag the folder to the side bar, call it 'recent', give it a proper icon and it's just like the new Nautilus:


With KDE's technology being as it is, it will also show in file open dialogs (even in Firefox, as openSUSE has KDE integration by default):

(unfortunately it can't actually open the files as the Firefox KDE integration only works with real, local files and these are 'virtual')

Of course, what you really want is that this is the default - the home folder that Dolphin opens when you start it. Unfortunately, here you'll bump in a limitation (or bug?) in Dolphin: it won't allow you to set this location from the GUI:


But challenges only exist to be overcome. Just edit
    ~/.kde4/share/config/dolphinrc
and navigate to the [General] section to edit the HomeUrl into: HomeUrl=timeline:/today.

Hit save and be happy. Ensure you don't have Dolphin running while you do this as it will overwrite the changes upon exit!

You'll now have your recent files always visible when you start Dolphin:

Enjoy!




And may I hereby propose to make this the default in Dolphin? I know, it depends on Nepomuk running, but we're going there anyway... I expect that the 5.0 release of Plasma Workspace has a Nepomuk up to this task, if the current one doesn't do it yet - for me, Nepomuk as part of KDE's 4.8 platform is good enough already and I know many bug fixes have been going in since this release. And of course we can always check if Nepomuk is available and if not, fall back on the 'old' home folder.



Update:
Scrap that proposal, the Dolphin developers are (of course) much smarter than I'll ever be. As you can see in the Plasma Workspace 4.9 announcement, Dolphin already has a feature similar (but better) than this:


I strongly suggest to support KDE developers as they are clearly VERY smart people ;-)

33 comments:

  1. I fail to see how making the Today view default be useful in any way. Inexperienced users would think that older files simply vanished. I can't imagine that the majority of users would support it. That's stuff to be put on KDE Brainstorm, so I could vote against it. :-p

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  2. dolphin is coool, thanks,, excellent work !!

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  3. Although this isn't something I'd use myself, I think it's very cool that you were able to put this together using existing technologies, almost made me wish you had a "You're welcome" segment ala' John Hodgeman (the daily show)) ;)

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  4. Immediately useful is very subjective. Most of the time I open a File Manager I want to browse for a specific folder. I can go to recent files from the application I opened them in. Also, recent events confirm that GNOME people might not have the brightest ideas ...

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  5. Thanks for sharing!

    One more great feature that should be exposed bye default, i dont know about making it the default start window, but having it in the sidebar out of the box would be great!

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  6. @Previous anon:
    A today button is already in the places sidebar in KDE 4.9 (at least on openSUSE, and you can see it in the first result in a google image search for "dolphin kde 4.9":
    http://www.linuxplanet.com/imagesvr_ce/2981/kde49-dolphin_thumb.png

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    1. So, I can take back my proposal - this is done and even better than I would've done it :D

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    2. BTW makes me wanna upgrade to SC 4.9...

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  7. Nice. I just tried and this works with folderview too.
    What does not seem to work is to have too different "homeUrls" in a splitview or did I overlook something?

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    1. No, that probably doesn't work - and I certainly haven't gotten that... Sorry if I gave that impression!

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  8. I agree with kaismh. File manager is for managing files.

    IMO, you shouldn't follow the open-dolphin-to-open-a-file mantra. Application launchers should be used for opening files (or anything else for that matter). Or, a folderview on the panel or something similar.

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    1. You mean I should open an application then open the file open dialog to open a file? I usually work based on content (the files), not what application I want to use...

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    2. Ivan: sorry, but it does not work for most of users. In your scenario, you have to exactly remember both application name and path to file to open file. While using Dolphin, you must only remember path - then you may just click on file and KDE will do the rest. If you are unsure, you can see list of all associated applications and select one.

      Imagine that you want to create new folder for some project. You create it with Dolphin, start some app, save file and navigate to folder you have been a while ago? Or just click RMB → Create new → filetype and click on that file?

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    3. @Jos

      No, I don't think you should first open the application.

      I'm saying that the launchers *need* to provide direct access to the documents.

      This is the one of the main reasons behind activities, linking the files to them, applications reporting which files they open etc. To provide the workspace with the information of which files are important to the user.

      @Miroslaw

      I usually create folders while saving the file. For example, I don't open dolphin, tell it to create a gimp image and click it; but open gimp, do something, save image into a new directory.

      BTW, your point shows another problem with the time-based dolphin - you can't create a folder in 'Today' kio - so your use-case also doesn't benefit from this idea.

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    4. For example: http://img13.imageshack.us/img13/620/snapshot1lt.png

      (this shows only the manually linked files, the automatically rated ones will be in 4.10 I hope)

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  9. "And may I hereby propose to make this the default in Dolphin? I know, it depends on Nepomuk running, but we're going there anyway... I expect that the 5.0 release of Plasma Workspace has a Nepomuk up to this task"

    Yes please Jos.

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  10. I should probably point out that the timeline kio slave only works for indexed files.

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    1. Which I think is great, because you can set some folder to not be indexed (because it is private stuff) and then it won't show up in the "recent" timeline. So imho that's great ;)

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  11. Please do not make this the default.

    First, I can hardly imagine something more useless, when starting the PC in the morning, firing up Dolphin and seeing … nothing, exactly, as nothing has been changed on that day.

    Second this whole dynamic placement of things is completely against how the brain works. To work efficiently you have to change control into feedback control, as that's what the brain can do best (fast while not strenouos). As the brain saves positions, colors, shapes and so on this dynamic reorganisation of stuff means that your brain always has to scan the complete folder instead of knowing that you have to click the third icon for the task at hand.

    All said, some easy reachable shortcuts with the categories "today", "yesterday", "most recent documents" (containing the last n documents with n ≈ 10) seem like a great idea.

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    1. .. and that's how it is already in dolphin 2.1!

      See http://www.linuxplanet.com/imagesvr_ce/2981/kde49-dolphin_thumb.png

      Smarter people than me work on Dolphin ;-)

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    2. But it is flawed design. The "Today, Yesterday" etc doesn't work and take away important space. You need to use HDD to use it, and still takes space. With SSD you can not use it because access times are not updated so you don't see anything.

      Instead giving a user change to add own groups to sidepanel, they are forced to have "Search for", "Devices", "Recently accessed" and "places". Only the last one belongs to Dolphin sidepanel by default, devices (removables) can be in some situations.

      All other should belong to "search" sidepanel on right side, where user selects file types, date from calender view and types some search words.

      Dolphin toke few steps back one one forward with latest version.

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    3. @Anonymous above:
      No, they still work, nepomuk does not depend on access times. There are some situations where it is not 100% dependable, I admit, but it works on my SSD (noatime mounted) just fine. I like the fact these searches are immediately visible as I surely don't want that search panel on the right to be there all the time - I use rather small dolphin windows most of the time. I admit I have to try to see if this works as I have quite a few places on the side but they do resize already and some are duplicates of these new ones.

      Last but not least, I bet you can right-click and remove them :D

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  12. Small bug: dolphin checks if a certain setting is in nepomukserverc to check if file indexing is turned on. Of course, file indexing could be turned on system wide (by default), but if the user doesn't have that in nepomukserverc, then dolphin won't show the new goodies in the Places panel.

    Disabling and re-enabling file indexing will turn on the shiny goodies.

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    Replies
    1. Good point, that's a real bug that imho should be reported...

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  13. Features are confusing. Dolphin confuses me.

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    1. Yes, it can do things, surely scary. I suggest to turn of your screen or close your eyes to reduce confusion.

      :P

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  14. Hi Jos!
    What widget it's for show differents world time zones??

    Thank's

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    1. It is the normal clock widget. You can configure them each to show a different timezone. The labels I made myself with 'plasmate' (see software.opensuse.org to install it), they are simple QML plasmoids. Just make one with this code and edit where needed:

      import Qt 4.7
      import org.kde.plasma.graphicswidgets 0.1 as PlasmaWidgets
      import org.kde.plasma.core 0.1 as PlasmaCore
      import org.kde.plasma.graphicslayouts 4.7 as GraphicsLayouts

      QGraphicsWidget {
      preferredSize: "150x40"

      Text {
      text: i18n("Brisbane")
      font.pixelSize: 20
      }
      }

      Hugs,
      Jos

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    2. I can't do even a simple "Hello world!"
      Anyway Thanx...

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  15. I have installed "plasmate" but I can't do a simple "hello world!" :(
    anyway Thnx!

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  16. You can set timeline:// as homepage now :)
    http://quickgit.kde.org/?p=kde-baseapps.git&a=commit&h=87a4eb9eaf69b8d0d4d873da75d240a410b05ed0

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