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Comment by Derbasti | Hacker News Reader

I love KDE. Its file manager in particular is a thing of beauty, unique in its ability to display large directories without slowing down and uniquely flexible and powerful. The desktop in general gets out of my way, with a good window switcher, launcher, and window manager. Nothing groundbreaking here, but everything mostly works as intended (looking at you, Win+Arrow on Gnome). Some of the default apps are great, like the PDF viewer Okular with its fantastic annotation tools.

The only thing I don't really care for is the default look, which is a bit dated. A refresh would be nice. To be fair, it is relatively easy to customize the colors, which helps. Still, that steel-gray-with-neon is a bit boring.

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Every now and then I see a picture of a UI circa 2000, and I mostly miss that era. Controls were organized. Everything clickable looked clickable. There were clear conventions. Controls did not obscure content.

Sure, it wasn’t pretty the way modern UIs are pretty, but users don’t need pretty.

Dolphin is the best. I love how it integrates a terminal that follows you through folders. Best of both worlds: GUI and CLI together

Why not add an email client panel as well?

Windowing should be a window manager concern. There is no reason for Dolphin to embed a terminal instead of your window manager to just keep a borderless Konsole next to it, like you might see on any tiled WM. It's pure bloat caused by inflexible software.

Personally I would love to see tabs, panes and all that crap disappear from any application. It shouldn't be their concerns to manage windows. My dream desktop would even have Emacs windows be separate frames managed by the window manager, not by Emacs itself.

? Aren’t Emacs frames (the C-x 5 2 variety) managed by the window manager already?

Yes, but Emacs tends to use windows (what one would call panes elsewhere) for everything, not frames, so it replicates badly something your desktop is already doing.

GP gave a reason: The terminal follows you around while you navigate in the file browser. I don't even know to think about where I would start to implement something like that in a tiling window manager. I'm pretty sure it would be a pretty ugly hack.

The fact that it's not done before doesn't mean that it should be rocket science to have two windows conjoined on one side.

Attaching the windows to each other has been done. Synchronizing their working directories, to my knowledge, has not.

The point is not the window-conjoining, it is synchronizing the app-specific state of the file browser with the state of the CLI in the terminal, and keeping that up to date as the user navigates around.

That seems pretty specific and outside the purview of what a window manager should be doing itself.

Hm, it would be cool though, if we could achieve some sort of piping system for graphical applications.

100% agree, but I think the actual number of use cases are not that many, the implementation complexity is high, and on top of that you then need buy-in from all the apps.

Would be really cool, though.

A potentially easier idea I have ruminated on is just letting apps (or better, having the OS almost force them to) expose a "current app environment state" that any other (authorized) app could read and subscribe to (in some waves hands efficient way).

Even in this example, though, you already have security concerns: do I want other apps to be able to know that my file browser is perusing the "pr0n" directory? If no, then how do we put the user in charge of that kind of thing in a way that is simple enough not to make the entire idea more trouble than it's worth?

would it be the WM's role to synchronize the terminal and the FM ?

Purity is not everything. Usability is.

KDE is architectured such that components can be embedded everywhere (kparts), it's one of its strength and it's also sound. Its own kind or purity.

Also Qt is really good at tabs and pane, I'm happy my WM doesn't concern itself with the content of my windows.

The goal of being able to embed apps everywhere reminds me of COM/OLE and ActiveX. No, thanks.

Again, and this time less sarcastically, if embedding is the goal, why can't I embed an email client and only the terminal is an approved extension? Seems awfully limiting.

Sure, I'll bite.

Embedding a terminal in a file manager solves a particular problem. It synchronizes the working directory of the terminal with the directory open in the file explorer. This is a pretty common problem to have, and there certainly are other solutions to it, but embedding a terminal within the explorer is a good solution for a lot of use cases. It's convenient, and it makes sense for a program that manages your files to enable you to more directly manage files with a terminal prompt.

It doesn't really make sense for a file manager to embed an email client because email doesn't usually involve file management. Needing to send an email from a particular directory isn't a problem that anybody has.

Could you synchronize a terminal window and a file explorer window? I'm sure you could with a bit of effort. You could also set up a whole tile manager and dock those two windows together.

For people who don't want to do all that, or don't use or don't like tiling, or who just want to run chmod +x on the file they downloaded, putting a terminal in the file manager is a perfectly valid solution to a relatively minor inconvenience. It even has a hotkey to close it when you don't want your window spoiled by a horrible subframe.

This is a common enough problem that Windows power toys used to have a way to open terminal from explorer right click menu. Very useful functionality.

Shift -> right click a directory and you get a context menu item to open powershell. You can registry hack to make it cmd instead. Been part of my normal work flow since windows 7 I think?

It reminds me of OpenDoc, which, for the extremely limited set of tech demos that worked (e.g. putting the BBEdit text editor into any app that edited text) was awesome and flabbergasting when I saw it.

Just because it failed and nobody has so far ever succeeded in delivering on that concept in a usable form doesn’t me we should just give up and go back to living in caves.

It also doesn’t mean that developers who deliver on that only in limited-but-useful ways should be dismissed because they also failed to deliver the comprehensive universal successful implementation of it.

You can embed an email client, if you want/need.

But it makes sense to embed terminal, since you often/sometimes want to run some command in that directory/folder. I never had a need to run mail in specific folder.

> Its file manager in particular is a thing of beauty, unique in its ability to display large directories without slowing down and uniquely flexible and powerful.

I've found PCManFM to be just as performant as Dolphin with very large (100k+ file) directories. I stopped using Dolphin because Dolphin can't sort a directory of symlinks correctly (it uses the dates of the target files, rather than the dates of the symlinks, with no apparent way to configure this.)

PCManFM-Qt is a truly wonderful thing with a terrible name.

> unique in its ability to display large directories without slowing down

Dolphin is fast, but I wouldn't call it unique in that regard.

Thunar was fast and powerful as well, and IMHO more intuitive than Dolphin. Unfortunately, it was ruined for me when Xfce adopted Gtk 3.

Before that was ROX Filer, perhaps the fastest I've used. I don't know if it's still maintained.

I think PCMan File Manager (from LXQt) might qualify as well.

All of those are so ugly and stripped down compared to Dolphin, though. (Maybe Thunar is more modern these days, at least?) Something like PCManFM is truly reminiscent of Win 9x.

In my experience, Thunar and Dolphin are comparable, with some features (e.g. bulk renaming, custom actions) much easier to use in Thunar. It's probably the thing I miss most about Xfce after switching to KDE.

The others are indeed minimalist. My point was mainly about speed. A lightweight file manager is always a key consideration when I try a new desktop environment.

During my dissertation, I routinely worked with directories containing hundreds of thousands of files. For not entirely unrelated reasons, I also had to reinstall the OS kind of a lot, and experimented with a few.

Most file managers slow down terribly/crash when asked to display such a directory. Windows can't do it. Gnome can't do it. Dolphin doesn't even break a sweat. It's impressive.

I bet it's technically because Dolphin is using the Qt List View, which lazy-loads its contents instead of being pre-filled with the entire list. At least that's what it feels like.

I prefer Dolphin to other file managers, but I feel it has a lot of issues when it comes to remote directories. Maybe someone has some good workarounds..

It will hang and become unresponsive over slow connections. If you try to access a phone filesystem (through KDEConnect) the whole thing will lockup for a minute or two - to the point where you need to force-kill Dolphin to close it (and no visual feedback on what's going on)

I've also had issues with its SSH remote-directory access. Generally the whole thing often goes into these unresponsive lock states as the a lot of operations aren't seemingly handled asynchronously (KDE on Jammy)

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