If I have selected and copied some text to the clipboard that includes newlines (and possibly other special characters that are not common in filenames such as ‘/’), and then paste it in Dolphin when renaming a file, Dolphin will happily keep the newlines. I realize that these characters are perfectly valid in Linux filesystems, but I would like to propose that Dolphin should strip out these characters by default. Here is my reasoning:
Most people do not put newlines in filenames, and so it is most likely not the intention of any user to keep the newlines when pasting a filename from clipboard. However, this is not immediately obvious to the user when pasting the filename
Practically speaking, newlines in filenames do not make sense and cause more problems than they solve
Newlines in filesystems may cause issues with interoperability (I don’t have evidence for this however).
This tends to happen a lot in particular when copying multiple line text from a PDF (where a newline is typically introduced) and then pasting it as the filename. In my case, I was copying the rather long title of a scientific paper and then attempted to paste it while renaming.
I am not sure if I should report this as a bug, because in Linux newlines are perfectly valid, so I’m posting it here first. This is more of a practical usability problem.
in my mind the clipboard should ALWAYS strip the new line character or any trailing spaces and only past the text as visible in the clipboard
the clipboard should NEVER paste non-visible characters
i don’t mind keeping new lines when moving blocks of text around in an editor, but when i paste a temp password from my email to a login screen, i expect to only paste the characters…not that extra non visible character on the end of the string.
I disagree with this assessment - I constantly use the clipboard to paste non-visible characters, such as Bidi control characters, non-breakable spaces and the likes. It will be a really shameful situation if the Plasma clipboard will prevent that usage. Even a terminating new line is something I would not want striped as it’s part of my process to cut 6 lines, including their trailing new line, and pasting them - where I want a trailing new lines - without needing to press enter again.
As to the original post - I recently had to fight with some problems I’ve encountered while scripting various file operations - caused by files with new line characters in the middle of the file name. Luckily, the problem was immediately obvious when I opened the folder in Dolphin, and also easy to fix. I think this is a useful feature to have - being able to create filenames with the full fidelity the Unix file system allows.
Though it may be interesting to have a feature where Dolphin warns you - when pasting - that you are about to paste text containing “uncommon characters for file names” and maybe even suggest to clean those up for you - like konsole warns you when you try to paste a lot of text.
