I’m in a precarious position, in that I like KTorrent, but I tend to gravitate towards QBittorrent because of a few features that are either missing, or hard to reach.
For example,
- There are no convenient ways to enable downloading files sequentially, with the first and last pieces downloaded as a top priority. This is very useful, if the shared media is sequential itself, like a video file.
- Open containing directory is, for some reason, considered an advanced feature. I find that I need it quite a lot, and while it’s easy to use
open directoryand add it to the toolbar, a) it doesn’t work, b) even if it did, that is not ergonomic. - I noticed that the equivalent of the
statusview in QBittorrent highlights the chunks that belong to each file individually. I would imagine that something like that would be useful in general, given that some torrents may contain more than one file. We can probably improve on QBittorrent here, by adding a preview of the file, when highlighting the chunk. - QBittorrent has a way of adding direct tracker search. This is super useful for trackers where built-in search functionality is sub-par, particularly those few trackers that are used for non-piracy torrents. I would imagine that given KDE’s approach to plugins and modules, it would be possible, nay useful, to try and produce something similar.
Other than that, there are a few modernising tweaks that could be done to KTorrent, to make it competitive, if not superior to other torrent clients.
For example, I would imagine that a badge indicating the number of magnetic links being downloaded would be useful. Maybe there ought to be columns where the delegate for each piece of data can be more expressive (like a combined size/percentage view, or combined up and download speed column).