Payed feature request: Vertical tabs

Development Sponsored Work
1

I keep plenty of tabs open in dolphin.
At times this makes it hard to find something.
In my browser sideberry has fixed this for me.

I would love to see some of its features in dolphin, and would be willing to pay to have this implemented.

I have split what I’d like to see in three steps:

  1. Bare minimum 50€
  • A side panel, that I can have on the right hand side of dolphin with a scroll-able vertical list, with all the open tabs (interactable like the current horizontal list).
  1. Features 150€
  • Tabs can have a tree-like hierarchy (open in new tab creates a branch)
  • Tabs can be grouped in renameable folders
  • Different tabs (sideberry calls them panels) to group tabs (also ranameable)
  • Tabs can be reordered and moved through these groupings and nestings using drag and drop
  • There is a search to find tabs
  1. Style 50€
  • Tabs and groups can be colored
  • The Tabs of tabs (sideberrys panels) are represented by colored symbols
  • The original horizontal tabs are (can be) hidden

All of this should of course be persistent between restarts.

This being contained in its own sidepanel should not interfere with KDEs own design choices.
Is this a sensible offer?
If not everything is possible, please advise.

2

Double all the numbers.
So
100€ for 1.
300€ for 2.
100€ for 3.

3

@Richardk2n I have prepared the €100 basic vertical Tabs panel from your offer.

It opens on the right, shows all open tabs in a scrollable list, and supports selection, keyboard use, closing, the existing tab menu, custom names, and drag reorder. A normal quit and restart restores the panel, names, order, and selected tab.

The review package contains the patch, full source, screenshots before and after restart, test logs, and a Docker build-and-test recipe. Nine new panel cases and nine existing tab/session cases pass. The full recipe also passed in a clean container.

This covers the basic stage only. The separate tree/group/search and style stages are not included. The code was prepared with AI assistance and has not yet been accepted upstream.

This new forum account cannot post links yet. Please tell me the preferred way to share the package for review.

Please review the result against the basic stage and confirm whether you accept it for the €100 payment. Payout details can be provided privately after acceptance.

4

If you have a PR already open, you can post the number here, this allows me to easily find it.

I can take a look on the weekend.
Let’s hope the dolphin team likes the idea as well.

5

Hi @Richardk2n — I’m interested in taking the remaining sponsored stages for this feature. Before I start any implementation, could you confirm whether the Features and Style stages are still open/unreserved, what the current bounty amounts are, whether you can reserve them to me before work begins, and whether PayPal payment to a contributor based in Brazil is okay? If yes, I can proceed once the scope and acceptance criteria are agreed.

6

As far as I know @Blueemi never made a PR and may not have implemented anything.
So stage 1 is not really done either.
Bounties are the ones from Oct 2025.
I am willing to reserve them (for some reasonable timeframe in case you disappear).
I am reasonably sure, that I can use PayPal to send money to Brasil and have no issues with it.

7

Thanks, Richard.

Please reserve all three stages for me under the October 2025 bounty
amounts for the next 21 days while I work through the upstream
implementation path.

Before I start the implementation, I just want to lock down the
payment trigger so there is no ambiguity later:

  • Are the stages paid once you verify that each stage is complete, or
    only after the corresponding change is merged upstream?
  • Please also confirm that the October 2025 amounts remain €100 / €300
    / €100 (€500 total).

PayPal to Brazil works for me.

Once you confirm those two points, I can proceed against that exact
acceptance/payment condition.

Franklin

8

Will do.

  • Paid on merge (If you cannot get it merged despite me finding the changes to be good, I might pay you anyway, but I cannot guarantee that)
  • The amounts remain 100 €/ 300 € / 100 € (= 500 € total).
9

As a dolphin maintainer, I am not in favor of of anything but 1. and I still have some reservations.

This serves very niche use cases, that no other filemanager have (not even krusader or TotalCommander familiy).
The places panel is effectively vertical tabs, clicking on entries loads pretty fast, their state is mostly persisted (or should with per-folder view settings option).
We already have a folder panel for similar structured folder display.
And we have bookmarks on top.

The dolphin code base must reflect its design philosophy: usable with rich features.
Vertical tree tabs, I would classify in “power”/feature first over usability.
Dolphin already has 4 panels, adding one to the list must worthwhile at least as much as the lowest usage one (folder panel or terminal panel) and I doubt a vertical tab one would fit.

To be clear, I enjoy tree vertical tabs in my browser, but I have a 100+ tabs often.
I don’t expect users to have a 100 folders opened in dolphin. Or they might want a different kind of application.

I’d be more interested in the workflow that this would help. I might need some more convincing. Proposing solutions without diagnosing the issue is not the way to go.
How come do you end up with that many tabs in dolphin, what is your use-case keeping so many around ?
Are vertical tabs the best/only solution for those ?
Can you find more users that would use this feature ?

This is dev-wise high-cost (beside 1.), for low-demand (no old time bug reported AFAICT), low usage in the end.
I have a lot more pressing features and bugs to fix rather than spending time on this.
I have to think about the hundred of thousands of users, I am only benevolent.

I also not happy to find a newcomer contributor being sponsored, I’d rather have someone already acquainted in the project, someone with some credibility. New contributors will require a lot more review work.

Whatever happens I am at the receiving end, and you put me in the crossedhair unwilingly for someone with money enticement.
I won’t compromise on quality or the current design of dolphin.

10

The main problem I took from the opening post:

At times this makes it hard to find something.

And the first solution that came to mind: what about a tab search? Maybe even as a krunner search plugin, similar to the “Browser Tabs” runner to keep dolphin’s UI unaffected?

11

I thought you meant tab search, as in the way a web browser does it through a drop-down. This is a feature request I had in mind, but hadn’t submitted because, for the most part, I never have more than 10 tabs open, and most times it’s only 4/5.

So even this may be unnecessary if the Dolphin window is wide enough.