More customisable places in dolphin

Brainstorm
1

I would really like to be able to more freely customise the Places panel in Dolphin, as the options for customisation are currently quite limited.

I think adding the following features would be really handy:

  • custom sections: currently only predefined Places, Remote and Devices sections are available, but adding custom ones with their own headings would make it easier to organise
  • separators: inserting lines/empty space to help make sense of the content of the panel
  • collapsible sections: being able to collapse custom and predefined sections, instead of needing to manually hide sections, would allow for adding more useful shortcuts without adding to much clutter

I kind of make do with some fake entries to make it easier for me to organise the panel (see below), but it’s not the most elegant solution.

panel
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You should also look at zoxide… and don’t forget that Dolphin has F4 terminal pane toggle.

If I want config, I do ‘z config’, more to the point - if I want to look at my kitty, or helix configs, I do ‘z helix’ or ‘z kitty’. I have some Pictures in storage, some in Home, and some in Dropbox, so to find/go to all those directories I can list with ‘zi Pictures’ and select.

Thus it’s not really efficient to ramp up the functionality of a basic ‘Places’ panel too much. Making the list too long defeats it’s purpose really.

I mean, let’s face it, how often do you actually open ‘.var’ in a file manager?

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I agree with your philosophy of not crowding the Places panel; my own consists only of “home,” “canvas” (replaces Desktop and Downloads), and “archive” (everything else). I basically completely revamped my home to be more minimalist and pragmatic. That being said, I think it’s important to not write off such uses too quickly, especially in an environment like the Plasma desktop—which literally uses the official tagline: “Simple by default, powerful when needed.” :slightly_smiling_face:

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Hello again @ben2talk (your avatar looks familiar).

Better filesystem navigation via terminal is on my to do list, so these are good suggestions for when I find the time. But I have a dissociative disorder, so difficulties with retention makes developing new skills slower than a typical user with intermediate-level skills, so using a GUI file browser is what I have to stick with for the time being unfortunately.

But that said, I do think more customisation options in the panel would be good for users that are never going to go that far in a terminal, like my GF.

…I’m not going to argue with you on that one :joy:

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If you want the ultimate filesystem navigation via terminal, install yazi. Thank me later.

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Ooh the image rendering in the terminal is verrry satisfying.

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For sure - it feels kinda janky too, loading up yazi in a Dolphin window - with the right hook (I forget how it was now) you fire it up with ‘y’ and when you ‘q’ it exits, and Dolphin goes to the current path when you quit.

Yazi with fzf and zoxide is amazing for sure… but we have to take pity on consider those folks who are allergic to the terminal…

So that would mean possibly making Places a little more like Bookmarks (which was conveniently forgotten, but is really the ideal place to store more than a few locations).

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Ha, I literally did this 5 minutes ago before reading this thread! (Trying to look at how a Flatpak app stored its config.)

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these are good suggestions and i find the Places panel (F9) far more useful than the windows explorer type Folders panel (F7), which i don’t even use.

Places helps me organize my work flow and provide quick navigation access to oft used locations, so a few more tools would help with that house keeping.

to define a more actionable feature request, we need to distinguish between the Places panel (F9) and the main section within the panel where Add to Places will put things

For me the change i would like to see would be confined to the main section of the panel since the other sections (Network, Recent, Devices) are already pre-defined and doing what they are intended to do.

so, i would say we need more SUB-sections within the main section and being able to add our own headings/groups or dividers would be a positive improvement.

this would mean we are discussing modifying this context menu in dolphin

Screenshot_20260311_061350
Screenshot_20260311_061350315×167 14.3 KB

to offer more types of entries, rather than simply a link to a folder as shown which should probably be changed to Add Location…

an additional option to add a visual decoration to panel that could be dragged around in the same way as a folder location, so an Add Decoration… in the context menu would lead to a dialog box where you could choose between a text header, blank space or a separator

the context menu that opens when right clicking on a decoration would give you the options to remove, or change to a text header, blank space, or a separator

this gets more complicated, as now we are talking about nesting and grouping entries in the panel, but i think is still worth strong consideration.

something akin to Add Submenu… as you find in the KDE Menu Editor under the Edit Applications action within the app menu/launcher

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I support this. It would be especially useful to have some separators to place.

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Thinking of this reminds me of Firefox - Ctrl_B pulls up the Bookmarks sidebar…

Now I’d vote for that…

F7 - Tree
Ctrl_B or some other ( is F8 free?) toggle Bookmarks
F9 - Places
F4 - for superheroes only :laughing:

:light_bulb: Alternative solutions

Ok, so when I started making my own launchers (i.e. individual settings windows) I put them in subfolders…

You could quite easily make a folder in /home called ‘shortcuts’ and LINK anything you want there - then add that as a Places item… That way you can have a ‘CandyStore’ with links to all the folders you like - so you click that, and the Candystore of shortcuts comes up in Dolphin…

Then literally any location you want to add to the sidebar, you can also drag to one of those category folders to link them in there.

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Workarounds are fine, but are we discussing here workarounds or how to make a product somehow better? :wink: Has it any downsides to implement at least one of these things?

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Well you’re talking about turning Places into more of a Bookmark manager - so that’s why I felt it relevant, not so much a workaround.

You can add a bookmarks folder in Places, but I’m not sure you can do nested folders from Places… it’s designed to open a single item in the main window… so you’d simply open the ‘bookmarks’ folder in the main window…

So overall, I think a bookmarks sidepanel would be better - all the ideas presented here are solved by using bookmarks, but bookmarks being a popup/dropdown menu isn’t the nicest way to interact with them.

Currently I tend to go in through the menu:
AltG→B

Just imagine if that would put the bookmark menu in your sidepanel… wouldn’t that be a solution?

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That is the point. I never use bookmarks - not in Dolphin, not in browsers. The moment I have to open a separate panel with a lot of entries I also can navigate manually.

And I just agreed with the thread opener. Personally separators would already solve almost any “issue” I personally have. Everything else is a bonus.

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how about this?

when you bring up the context menu

Screenshot_20260311_061350
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and choose Add Entry… you get a dialog box

Screenshot_20260311_101601
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what if this dialog box had radio buttons to choose between a

  • Text Header

  • Blank Space

  • Separator

  • Label/Location (current option)

3 Likes
17

Another option would be to add new items in the current panel context menu, like Add Section and Add Separator.

The context menu would contain, for example:

Add Entry
Add Section
Add Separator
---------------------
Hide Section 'Recent'
Show All Entries
Icon Size
---------------------
Lock Panels
18

I had the same thought few days ago.

I will appreciate something like that too.

At least, separators to differentiate different distant sources / account / servers (without a long name).This would be particularly appreciated for folders that have the same name on different servers…

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Just chiming in to mention that dolphin does have an actual bookmark feature, it’s just got hidden away ever since the global menu button got added, but you can add it as a toolbar button for quick access and it basically works the same as in your browser of choice browser. I think putting this to good use would be more sensible instead of flooding the places section.

It just needs a bit more development love, like handling middle / ctrl click to open bookmarks in a new tab, which for some reason it just doesn’t do.

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We have bookmarks for that kind of use case where you can have a tree structure.
You can add a toolbar button to make them more accessible.

The missing feature is to make them accessible through the places panel though.

1 Like