First impressions of dolphin

[Juan Carlos Torres]

On Wednesday 03 October 2007 6:58:25 pm Peter Lewis wrote:

> 2. There's no refresh button. How do I know if it's showing the latest
> contents if I update the folder from somewhere else (i.e. konsole)? Or is
> this just a trust issue? It would be nice to *know*.

You can manually put it by configuring the toolbar (right-click on the 
toolbar). It's not there by default because Dolphin is supposed to have fixed 
Konqueror's bug of not automatically updating on changes.

> 3. I have to click somewhere before I can type in the address where I want
> to go to, and where to click is not obvious (or indeed that that
> functionality even exists).

There is only actually only one place to click in order to be able to type in 
the exact location, that is on the icon at the leftmost part of the 
breadcrumb bar, the Edit Location icon (keyboard shortcut Ctrl+L).

> 4. The breadcrumbs things seems broken by design IMO. When I'm in MY home
> directory, /home/pete, it says "home", then, if I go to /home/pete/work, it
> says "home->work". Conversely, if I navigate to another user's home folder
> (say a KDE4 dev user), it says I'm in "root->home->kdedev". This is
> confusing.

The Home location there is not the /home folder. Notice the difference in 
case. If you click on the Home button, it will drop down a list of other 
locations, which, if you'll notice is the same as the Bookmarks. Yes, those 
are bookmarks, not absolute paths to folders. That Home is your equivalent to 
~.

Now, if you go to kdedev's home folder, that is not your home folder anymore, 
not ~. So naturally, it will not say Home. It will give you the breadcrumb 
from the / though, which is Root.

> and dolphin seems to be the most
> confusing KDE app I've seen. But yes, it is quite fast (not that konqueror
> is slow though).

How amusing. You're actually the first person I heard say that. Most people 
say that Konqueror is the confusing one. But yes, it needs a bit of getting 
used to the new breadcrumb (since it's something very new to KDE in general, 
but not to GNOME :P).

> If this is to be the default file manager in gutsy (or KDE generally), and
> one of the reasons for this is "usability" (whatever that means), then
> these IMO need addressing.

If it's any comfort to you, the version of Dolphin on Kubuntu (actually it's 
D3lphin) is far behind in development compared to the one currently in KDE 4. 
So don't throw in the towel just yet. :)