Dolphin: Disable hierarchical view ("Open File" dialog)

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:

Hierarchical dialog:

Can this be changed? I think the hierarchical, “top down” view is terrible, not even having a directory bar on the top.

Thank you!

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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.

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