Dolphins “Show information on Hover” popup could be modified to display in a fixed, centered position that scales to content, summoned by a hotkey.
The content would be that of the “Information” panel preview, without the meta data panel at the bottom.
Thus you would have a feature similar to Apples Quick Look and Gnomes Sushi.
I make frequent use of the “Information” panel, which I’ve mapped to the spacebar, but I find it’s use is limited on a laptop because the “meta data” panel at the bottom can’t be hidden or removed, which restricts the size of the document preview.
The Files app of the new Cosmic desktop has implemented a file preview feature that works very nicely and works how people like me, who work with documents and images, and not code, would expect such a feature to work.
Be lovely to have have HTML preview, I have thousands of old MAFF and “SingleFile” saved HTML. And Markdown. That’s all I use. HTML, PDF, Markdown, and image files.
Kiview seems to work but…um…that is a very unfinished product. I need to take another look at some of the commands but…
For one, if you have a directory which contains several folders, you can’t simply select a folder ( or file for that matter) to start. It’ll go through ALL the folders ( sometimes). The ui is ok-ish, apart from the huuuge fonts used in the main and submenu. But yeah, it works. Kinda. I read the reasons why the quick view was discontinued but I can tell you right now, it worked a whole lot better than kiview. A whooole lot better.
the way it works is make or break with this sort of thing. it has to be fast, smooth, polished and resilient.
gnome nautilus / sushi / tracker was fast and smooth when it worked. open a folder of files, hit the spacebar, flip through with arrow keys, find what I want, bang space to close the preview, the file is selected, hit a hot key to activate “Move To…” ( I had to build nautilus to add in the hot key ), start typing the folder name I want to file it in, the folder appears in the “instant search” , select it, smack return, the file is moved, bang F2 to rename, you’ve filed your file in the filing system, hit return and it’s open in the default app and you can edit. when it worked, very smooth and quick. sadly bugs would sometimes take out the whole shell when you activated “Move to…”. Perhaps why the function had no hot key OOTB.
when I shifted to KDE, Sushi was still installed. I made a “service menu” that fed sushi the selected file and it worked, but I couldn’t get it to update by moving the selection in Dolphin with the arrow keys. perhaps some qdbus scripting could do it.
Like I said, this isn’t a finished product. Somehow it’s over complicated as compared to the quick view thingie. And it does a worse job at it. Yes, the information panel is ok. Even better in krusader.
