How to get rid of the thick top border in Dolphin's split-view location bar?

Help
1

Hi, and thank you for your time!

Does anyone know how to get rid of the thick top border that appears in Dolphins’ location bar when split-view is activated?

You can see it here: video on YouTube.

System properties:

Operating System: Manjaro Linux
KDE Plasma Version: 6.6.4
KDE Frameworks Version: 6.25.0
Qt Version: 6.11.0
Kernel Version: 6.18.24-1-MANJARO (64-bit)
Graphics Platform: X11
Processors: 4 × Intel® Core™ i3-4170 CPU @ 3.70GHz
Memory: 17 GB of RAM (16.7 GB usable)
Graphics Processor: NVIDIA GeForce GT 730/PCIe/SSE2

I’m on Manjaro-unstable and Dolphin is 26.04.0.

2

I guess you can’t. The change is intentional. You can see its rationale from the links in kurlnavigator: show focus indicator (top version) (!2058) · Merge requests · Frameworks / KIO · GitLab

And in the default color scheme, the “top border” is bright blue so that you can see at a glance which side is active.

3

Thank you!

The faded look of the inactive side was enough for me, so when I switched to the unstable branch of Manjaro I instantly disliked this yet another board light on an increasingly busy UI. It feels like accessibility features are forced upon users that do not need them.
I switched to unstable precisely to run from some other UI regressions.

Oh, well… I love KDE and Dolphin and UI papercuts multiplying by the day just saddens me. I wish KDE team would have funds to do proper UI research.

4

This depends on the used theme. I just switched split-screen on and off and get no thick top border:
Single screen:

image
image1620×308 56.7 KB

Split screen:

image
image1620×308 42.8 KB

I can’t tell which of the themes causes this, I use:

Global theme:       Fedora dark (resembles Breeze dark)
Colors:             Breeze dark
Application style:  Breeze
Plasma style:       Breeze Dark
Window decorations: Wings-Dark-Aurorae-6
Icons:              Infinity-Dark-Icons
5

Thank you! I think that your Dolphin being an older version is the reason it does not have this issue. It didn’t happen on Manjaro-stable with Dolphin 25.12, also.

6

This isn’t accessibility but usability, nothing is really particular for the users that benefit most for this.

Reports after reports, a significant part of users, felt the focus hints were too subtile:

CCBUG: 150718
CCBUG: 428440

Now we may allow to accommodate users. We know our users kurlnavigator: show focus indicator (top version) (!2058) · Merge requests · Frameworks / KIO · GitLab and any change meets a counter-effect against change.

See if that can grow on you at least please. We’d (as in Dolphin contributors) rather fix bugs and add features, than add a setting for every UI elements (The latest release added a setting for the tab width…) and then other users will complain “there is too many options” which is also legitimate.
Themes can still be tweaked.

Yet successful apps need to take affirmative choices, we can’t sugar coated for every users.

7

It feels an accessibility feature to me because it seems related to contrast, and contrast requirements can be found in the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.

I was not able to grasp the extent of the usability testing done for this from the links provided. I also fear that the current method of sampling users’ choices favors the vocal few.

Oh well, I still love KDE and Dolphin, and, given some time without surprises, I’ll probably develop some UI-blindness.