Hello,
sometimes Dolphin’s “Open File” window uses a hierarchical view. I think this may be the default view when opening files on AppImages or something. Is it the program’s fault or can this someway be changed? I don’t think it’s the program’s fault because when performing the exact action on the exact AppImage on GNOME, it would of course open the Nautilus dialog, implying that it’s not “embedded” in the AppImage.
Desired dialog, for example used by KDEnlive by default:
This is an XDG Desktop portal action - the application asks the desktop environment to show a file picker, and the desktop environment provides the UI, regardless of what toolkit the application is built with.
As you can read in the API specifications for the FileChooser.OpenFile action, there’s a flag that the application can set called directory, which when set instructs the desktop portal to show a folder selector (what you call a “hierarchical dialog”).
Plasma offers the “directory mode” feature in its XDG desktop portal implementation as a different UI - the “folder chooser” UI is preferable because it clearly explains that you are selecting a folder and not a file, and it also allows you to much more quickly go through the directory tree.
The GNOME XDG desktop portal didn’t have that feature at all, initially, and when they added that feature they implemented it as the regular file chooser with a display filter that hides all files.
As far as I know there’s no option to “force using file chooser when app asks for a folder chooser”, though personally I think that Plasma’s implementation is superior so I didn’t bother searching for such a configuration option.
I don’t think this is a solution, unless the solution is “don’t use KDE”.
If I double click on a folder to open it, it goes to rename the folder.. You have to mouse over and click each individual chevron to navigate, it’s very very painful.
This view is missing a lot of affordances.
I would be willing to do the work to fix it, it makes sense to have the select folder and select file chooser behave differently, but this is simply too painful to use, saying that this is how its supposed to be and there is no way to change it is not a solution IMO.
If you think the folder chooser can be improved - in specific ways, that isn’t “use the file chooser to to select folders” - then you are quite welcome to suggest such improvements by opening a ticket in bugs.kde.org or by offering merge requests in Frameworks / KIO · GitLab
There are definitely things that bother me in the folder selector dialog, and it will be nice to see some of those fixed.
