Select on hover in Dolphin

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1

While I’ve been getting used to having to control click to select items without opening them, I find myself missing the “Highlight on Hover” functionality from Windows, I know there’s a setting in Dolphin to make things light up when you hover but it’s not quite the same.

Is there a way to have it select items when I hover over them?

2

No.

That would be an horrible features IMO, so error-prone and unexpected.

We have the selection mode, shortcut space to do selection with a single click.

You also can use draw rectangles to select batch of files, change view , sorting or grouping to make selection easier.

In term of selection power, dolphin already offers all the bells and whistle AFAICT.

I’d be curious to know your actual use-case.

3

I might be oversimplifying but from my perspective it would be removing the control click part of selecting a single item and allowing the option to select when I hover for an allotted period of time. However “No” is fine by me, I can get used to current system, as you say, Dolphin has all the things I actually need and some more.

4

The use case is that you can press F2 to rename a file you are pointing at, since it’s already selected. Without it, you have to ctrl+click the file, or click the small selection button first, and only then you can press F2.

Similar for copying with Ctrl+C and other actions. When the file under the cursor is automatically selected, it’s fast to work with, but without it there is a 2 step process to every interaction.

An alternative solution would be to have an option for all such actions to default to the highlighted/hovered file when no file is selected, instead of opening the Selection Mode, so that you can Ctrl+C a file you are pointing at without having to select it. All the current approaches require multiple steps to complete these common actions. This would solve the actual problem without actually affecting selection modes.

5

So you are using single-click mode, that’s an important thing to take into account. (but @Nohus you don’t the same person as @AdamKafei ).

I didn’t have this in mind.

How should it work ? A suggestion how to turn it on/off ?

It could keep changing the selection on mouse hover as long as a single file is selected or fewer.

I can imagine a toggle in the settings.

That could work.

Agreed.

I would suggest you to have a feature for dolphin: https://bugs.kde.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=dolphin

Copy-pasting, your usecase (mentioning single click), suggestions and linking to here.

1 Like
6

A few points I would like to add:

  • There is an option in System Settings > Workspace > General Behavior > Clicking. It allows to toggle between Clicking to Select an item (file/folder) and Clicking to Open an item (file/folder). This setting is very related to Dolphin, imo, and the ability to change this setting (at least on machines that are running Plasma DE) from Dolphin may be given. The first place that users sees to change this behavior is more likely to be Dolphin settings. It might also make sense if changing the setting in Dolphin changes it in System Settings > Workspace > General Behavior > Clicking as well.
  • Setting to Clicking to Open an item (file/folder) may present the user with the options to:
    • Select by clicking on item's selection marker
    • Select by hovering on the item for ___ ms (say 250 ms by default)
      • this, I believe is the feature being requested here.
7

Yes, but even with double-click mode, you still need to click the file before you can rename/cut/copy it. It’s less of a problem than in single-click mode since you don’t need to aim for the small selection button or ctrl+click, but the extra step is still there.

The way it works on Windows (which has this behavior when you use Explorer in single-click mode), is that it selects the file under your cursor after a delay of about half a second. That way it doesn’t select files when you are just moving your cursor about. It still does it even if you have multiple files selected, which then get unselected. Not saying this is the best approach, but it’s one approach, which I think is fine.

Personally, I think targeting file action shortcuts (copy/cut/rename) to the hovered file when no file is selected would be more than enough, and I don’t see a need to actually have the hovered file get selected automatically, but maybe other people have a different opinion. To me it solves the use cases I can think of without complicating selection modes, but it may also be less discoverable/intuitive than actually selecting the file. This could be a toggle in the settings as you say.

I have opened the feature request here: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=509427

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8

This is known as “dwell clicking”. It’s a popular a11y feature especially among disabled people. I used it for a while when I broke my hand and could arm-aim but not click. I thought that perhaps the search keyword might be useful.

9

I just noticed GitHub - taj-ny/InputActions: Mouse and touchpad gestures for Hyprland, Plasma 6 Wayland has a very recent commit which adds dwell as a gesture. I use this software all day every day and highly recommend it, and though I have not tried that gesture, I do know that this will allow you to make it dolphin-specific, too.