A cursory look into KDE 4 file management: Dolphin beta
Windows has Explorer. Mac OS has Finder. GNOME has Nautilus. And KDE had, up to a number of months ago, Konqueror. Now, together with the up-and-coming KDE 4, a simple file manager named Dolphin takes on file management. So how does Dolphin stack up?
Very well, I must confess. File management is an everyday task — and most file managers get it right. What they usually don’t get right is the ability to do advanced things in an intuitive and discoverable way. Dolphin does — it successfully merges a basic file management interface with the most-requested advanced features, and in a non-obtrusive way.
Now, it’s been three weeks since I’ve been using Dolphin (the KDE 3 version) exclusively. As it turns out, Dolphin is quite versatile (if a bit more flickery than Konqueror 3) and faster as well. My only caveat was that I had to manually associate the inode/directory MIME type to get it to take over directory browsing.
But today, for the purposes of this review, it’s Dolphin 4 all the way.
How Dolphin starts up
There’s nothing magical about Dolphin. Picture a Windows Explorer folder view (with the side panel, not the side tree). Picture a Nautilus browse folder. That’s how Dolphin looks like:
Of course, Dolphin has the ability to show previews like any other file manager. If you want it to show previews, you just hit the big Previews button, and presto:
Network transparency
Of course, Dolphin wouldn’t be part of KDE if it didn’t put to use the fantastic KIO technology. KIO is a way for applicatios to request and send data to local and remote file systems. Any application that uses KIO gets two big advantages:
- It becomes asynchronous. File operations never hang, because things happen upon notifications instead of waiting for them to happen.
- It gains the ability to access data anywhere in the world, through any popular protocol (HTTP, WebDAV, FTP, SFTP, SSH and much more).
And Dolphin is no exception. However, I didn’t test KIO remoting via SFTP on Dolphin 4, so you’re just gonna have to take my word for it. It’s okay — I use it every day in Dolphin 3.
It hangs. Hard. But, well, it’s a beta
Of course, it wouldn’t be a beta if it didn’t hang 
Let’s continue to explore what’s new in the (admittedly rather boring) file management world.
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October 18th, 2007 at 15:26
One very important thing is missing in Dolphin : - sort by type.
I can’t understand how the developpers did forget such a functionality…
October 21st, 2007 at 20:03
[...] Rudd-O.com recently posted a look at the new KDE 4 window manager to replace Konqueror. Although there is nothing really exciting about a new window manager, it is very nice to see the old one, Konqueror, replaced, because I always found it to be one of the few annoying features of KDE. [...]
October 21st, 2007 at 20:06
Great article! I am really glad to see Konqueror being replaced by Dolphin. I can’t wait for KDE 4. I just wrote about this article on my site.
October 21st, 2007 at 21:21
click on “Details” in the toolbar, right click on the headers in the file listing (the ones that say “Name”, “Size”, “Modified”…) and select Type. now click on the newly displayed Type column. presto: sort by type.
a minor usability bug atm is that the View -> Additional Information entry only works with icon views not detail views.
these are sorts of little bits of refinement we’ll see between now (4.0beta3) and 4.1.
October 21st, 2007 at 21:24
click on “Details” in the toolbar, right click on the headers in the file listing (the ones that say “Name”, “Size”, “Modified”…) and select Type. now click on the newly displayed Type column. presto: sort by type.
a minor usability bug atm is that the View -> Additional Information entry only works with icon views not detail views.
these are sorts of little bits of refinement we’ll see between now (4.0beta3) and 4.1.
regarding strigi/nepomuk integration, the information sidebar uses them for metadata such as ranking and tagging. but yes, it’s not as integrated as will eventually become. the really good news is that this integration will largely happen using the xesam spec (which was spearheaded by the strigi team on freedesktop.org) which means that one will be able to use it with any search back end that implements the xesam query language system.
October 22nd, 2007 at 5:36
KDE rocks.. I am eagerly waiting for the version 4. Hope dolphin will be much faster than konqueoro
October 23rd, 2007 at 6:32
I upgraded to Kubuntu Gutsy and found that the file manager is changed to dolphin. I was happy with it for a while (because faster startup), until I started to work seriously with it.
-In the preview view I cant change the size of the images large enough to use. -Too much space between the images. -At the right sidebar there is a preview, but too small and without image resolution info. (Konqueror shows a larger preview image in a tooltip with more info) -In Konqueror easy to switch the “show hidden files” item, it’s in the menu. In dolphin it’s much harder. I need this all the time.
Sorry, but it’s one step forward and two (or more) steps back.
October 23rd, 2007 at 9:02
To increase the size of the previews, go to the preferences in Dolphin.
The preview resizes itself with the width of the sidebar.
Show hidden files can be added to the toolbar as a toggle button.
The next dolphin 4 changes the preview/icons behavior to one you’ll like even more.
October 24th, 2007 at 5:49
Seems like Kubuntu Gutsy (I upgraded from Feisty) has an older or buggy version of Dolphin. If I change the preview images largest size it’s still the same. The same applies to the sidebar preview images, they don’t resize. One time it showed me resolution info at ONE image, but no more since then.(???)
I found the show hidden files icon, thanks for it!
October 29th, 2007 at 1:07
@sede
Kubuntu includes the old version of Dolphin, based on Qt3. It is very different from the one that will be included in KDE4. However, if you are looking for a good Dolphin for KDE3, check out D3lphin. It’s the KDE3 version of Dolphin, with a few bugfixes (show hidden files is in the menu for example, and other things).
October 29th, 2007 at 7:30
“And it’s not like they can’t associate inode/directory back to Konqueror, can’t they?
“
Actually, I believe I read that you will be able to change this preference in KControlCenter/Personal settings.
November 9th, 2007 at 17:46
Ive used dolphin3 and like it quite a lot, the only things are, i cant resise the preview icons (with ctrl scroll)
and there dousent seem to be a tree view available,
tree view > breadcrumb trail IMHO
November 13th, 2007 at 6:16
It’s really quite important to point out that Kubuntu Gutsy does not have dolphin. It has d3lphin, which has a symlink from the command dolphin (do a ls -l
which dolphin). d3lphin is a neat little backport of an earlier version of dolphin with some features disabled. It’s certainly worthy of review, but it also is not dolphin. This is a review of d3lphin.November 14th, 2007 at 1:31
No, this is Dolphin 4. Pay attention to the theme. It’s Oxygen.