Move File To New Folder on Dolphin doesn't work on folders

Panino · June 29, 2025, 10:40pm

Yesterday I switched to openSUSE and as far as I can see everything is working better than on the Debian/Ubuntu distros I always used. I imagine that I’ll probable stumble on a few problems eventually, but for now only this strange thing on Dolphin.

It’s like the title says, and the folders are “Imagens” and “smplayer_screenshots”. No problems moving files to new folder on any other folders inside these two, but directly from these two Dolphin says that “it wasn’t possible to create the folder”.

Tried looking into the Properties and Permissions for the folders, but didn’t worked.
I wonder if this is related to this Home partition coming from an older installation, but if was the case, should I have problems on all folders? That’s why I suspect is a problem with Dolphin, not the system or partitions.

Looked on system log and I think this is the line related to the error: “Creating a popup with a parent, QWidgetWindow(‘numbers’, name=“Dolphin#1Window”) which does not match the current topmost grabbing popup, QWidgetWindow('numers”, name=DolphinContexMenuClassWindow") With some shell surface protocols, this is not allowed. The Wayland QPA plugin is currently handling it by setting the parent to the topmost grabbing popup. Note, however, that this may cause positioning errors and popups closing unexpectedly. Please fix the transient parent of the popup."

Have no idea what this means, I tested on both X11 and Wayland.

rodrigopedra · June 30, 2025, 2:16am

Can you run these commands on Konsole and paste the output?

ls -ld Imagens smplayer_screenshots
lsattr -d Imagens smplayer_screenshots

If it complains the Imagens directory does not exist, Dolphin might be automatically translating it as it is one of the xdg-user-dirs, so change it to Pictures on Konsole:

ls -ld Pictures smplayer_screenshots
lsattr -d Pictures smplayer_screenshots

Panino · June 30, 2025, 10:51am

These commands confirms that “Imagens” exists, but not “smplayer_screenshots”

ls -ld Imagens smplayer_screenshots
ls: não foi possível acessar ‘smplayer_screenshots’: Arquivo ou diretório inexistente
drwxrwxr-x. 15 panino panino 57344 Jun 29 17:10 Imagens

lsattr -d Imagens smplayer_screenshots
-----------I–e------- Imagens
lsattr: Arquivo ou diretório inexistente ao tentar analisar smplayer_screenshots

Panino · June 30, 2025, 10:53am

Oh, if I type
ls -ld Imagens/SmplayerScreenshots
lsattr -d Imagens/SmplayerScreenshots

It finds he folders.
Returns
drwxrwxr-x. 32 panino panino 221184 Jun 30 07:24 Imagens/SmplayerScreenshots

and

-----------I–e------- Imagens/SmplayerScreenshots

But the error still occurs.

rodrigopedra · June 30, 2025, 9:48pm

I guess your user is panino, if so, it seems everything is configured as expected in respect to your folder permissions.

If you can create a directory or a file within these directories through Konsole, then it surely is a problem with your dolphin installation.

To test if you can create a directory, you can run this command from your home folder:

mkdir Imagens/SmplayerScreenshots/folder

To create an empty file, you can try:

touch Imagens/SmplayerScreenshots/file.txt

And to reinstall Dolphin, you can run this command from Konsole:

sudo zypper install --force --recommends dolphin

The --force flag is to force reinstall, and the --recommends flag is to install any recommended package for Dolphin.

You can also try reinstalling the plasma package for any missing packages:

sudo zypper install --force --recommends patterns-kde-kde_plasma

And then installing any missing recommended packages:

sudo zypper install-new-recommends

Panino · July 1, 2025, 12:13am

Promising suggestions.
But reminder that everything is working, it’s only “Move to New Folder” on these two folders.

Reinstalling Dolphin will erase all my configurations? The panels, the buttons?

rodrigopedra · July 1, 2025, 12:38am

Reinstalling Dolphin will erase all my configurations? The panels, the buttons?

No.

Your custom configuration is stored in your home folder’s .config directory. Reinstalling Dolphin won’t mess with any user files.

jamesfrederik · July 1, 2025, 6:48am

I encountered the same problem so I use this instead

edit :
hmm, I should say “used” as it appears to have vanished from dolphin.

meven · July 1, 2025, 7:49am

The current implementation in dolphin is restricted to files, but it could handle folders too.

meven · July 1, 2025, 8:57am

Dropping them into new folder does work.

If you disabled the drop popup, You need to hold SHIFT to have the menu.

Panino · July 2, 2025, 1:29am

I know, I also move files that way, but like I’m saying this isn’t the problem.
It’s only “move to new folder” and only on two folders.
And specifically the folders where I use this feature 90% of the time.

Panino · July 2, 2025, 1:30am

This add-on is identical to “move to new folder”.
Didn’t knew there was another one so similar, installed it from discover (because directly from Dolphin was crashing trying to load the add-on window) and is working.

I think until I find a solution to this I’ll use this other add-on.

jamesfrederik · July 2, 2025, 5:55am

ah, that would explain it. I thought it failed randomly. so it’s just when you select folders. I never noticed the pattern. which says something about my powers of deduction. instead I rolled back to the thing I was using previously. I suppose this is why we keep re-electing the same bunch of crooks every alternate election..

so change the .json file to

  "MimeTypes": [
    "application/octet-stream",
    "inode/directory"
  ],

and we get folders too?

meven · July 2, 2025, 9:15am

Yes, the code could have done in the first place, the contributor that did it didn’t think about it.

There is a complication, with this change this would work also for the current folder when there is no selection. This would need to be handled in the code.

jamesfrederik · July 2, 2025, 10:10am

yes it works. fantastic.

There is a complication, with this change this would work also for the current folder when there is no selection. This would need to be handled in the code.

hmm, I see what you mean. but I think I like it.

I like the select a few files, and drag and drop it to create and move too.

it’s been a good month for dolphin

Panino · July 4, 2025, 2:55am

Oh, unfortunately, this “Create folder from selected files” doesn’t really work. It only works well with very few files. With dozens of files it takes ages to ask for the name of the folder and than it almost freezes Dolphin while moving the files.

The native feature on Dolphin is instantaneous.

Unrelated: playing videos on the preview panel just stopped working this morning for no reason (Tumbleweed).

jamesfrederik · July 4, 2025, 5:10am

ok that’s good to know, I only ever move a few files at a time so I’d not run into that limitation.

so I made that little tweak to the json file of the native function and am running my own fork of dolphin and it’s working just great. so yeah, I’m not using the service menu anymore.

and for some reason it wasn’t showing up either. possibly due to something I’ve done to my local dolphin build.

anyway it’s worth building your own copy to enable that extra mimetype.

Panino · July 5, 2025, 10:23am

I believe I found the problem, is a Dolphin’s bug introduced in 25.4.2!

There are characters that are forbidden on a folder, right?
If any file you want to move have those forbidden characters somehow Dolphin gets confuses and mistakes the folder path. Instead of trying to created folder/folder/newfolder/ it does folder/folder/nameofthefile/newfolder. And because “nameofthefile” contains forbidden characters it fails.