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List:       kfm-devel
Subject:    Re: Review Request 115357: Add a shortcut for copying current directory
From:       "Frank Reininghaus" <frank78ac () googlemail ! com>
Date:       2014-01-29 17:27:15
Message-ID: 20140129172715.2191.14135 () probe ! kde ! org
[Download RAW message or body]

> On Jan. 28, 2014, 3:58 p.m., Frank Reininghaus wrote:
> > First of all, thanks for the patch!
> > 
> > To quote my comment https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=323960#c3 :
> > 
> > "...this is one of the cases where I wonder if this feature is really useful enough that it \
> > justifies adding code which must be maintained in the future, and adding another action \
> > that makes the shortcuts dialog harder to use (I admit that it's a big mess not not very \
> > useable already)."
> 
> Frank Reininghaus wrote:
> Hm, I shouldn't have copied the typo from the comment ("not not" -> "and not"):
> 
> "...this is one of the cases where I wonder if this feature is really useful enough that it \
> justifies adding code which must be maintained in the future, and adding another action that \
> makes the shortcuts dialog harder to use (I admit that it's a big mess and not very useable \
> already)." 
> Yichao Zhou wrote:
> Well.  I really like this feature...
> 
> IMHO, adding 2 more actions really will not make shortcuts dialog much harder to use.  See, \
> we already have had more than 70 actions there.  Add 2 extra options will at most cost us \
> about 3% increase of entropy even if they are totally useless. 
> For the maintenance overhead, this patch only adds 70 lines of code, most of which is the \
> declaration.  I think it is unlikely that any part of it will be modified in the future. 
> Anyway.  I think that's all what I can do.  If main developers really do not will to merge \
> it, let's just leave it here.

If you look at the hundreds of wishlist reports at bugs.kde.org, you will find the sentences "I \
really like this feature" and "I don't think that this little change will make Dolphin much \
harder to use" very frequently. And yes, many of these wishes could be implemented with less \
than 100 lines. Every single request may look quite harmless, but if a considerable number of \
them was implemented, their effects on usability and code complexity would add up, and then \
they would not look so harmless any more.

Therefore, the question if a feature is really important enough for a considerable part of our \
user base to justify these (potentially bad) side effects must be evaluated for every single \
feature before we can consider to add it.

For the feature which is under discussion here, we have one single user (you) who wants the \
feature, and IMHO, this is by far not enough to justify a non-trivial change in the \
application. Sorry about that.

That being said, I acknowledge that people will always have ideas how Dolphin could be modified \
to better suit their workflows. Probably the best solution for everyone would be to enable \
users to add functionality to Dolphin.

Christoph suggested in your wishlist report to make it possible to assign shortcuts to service \
menu entries. This approach might have some problems though, e.g., that there are \
KAbstractFileItemAction plugins which create (possibly multiple) actions at runtime. This would \
make it impossible to assign any shortcuts to these actions in advance. Moreover, there would \
always be an ambiguity concerning "apply the action to the selected items/the current item" and \
"apply the action to the view URL".

An alternative solution might be a way to assign shortcuts to external applications, and \
optionally pass either the URL which is shown in the view, or the URL of the selected items or \
the current item on the command line. You could then easily implement your wish without any \
further changes in Dolphin by assigning the new shortcut to an application that copies its \
command line argument(s) to the clipboard.

I'm not sure what would be the best way to expose such a functionality to the user though, and \
I'm not even sure if this makes any sense at all. Maybe one could start a discussion about this \
issue on the usability mailing list.


- Frank


-----------------------------------------------------------
This is an automatically generated e-mail. To reply, visit:
https://git.reviewboard.kde.org/r/115357/#review48484
-----------------------------------------------------------


On Jan. 28, 2014, 3:55 p.m., Yichao Zhou wrote:
> 
> -----------------------------------------------------------
> This is an automatically generated e-mail. To reply, visit:
> https://git.reviewboard.kde.org/r/115357/
> -----------------------------------------------------------
> 
> (Updated Jan. 28, 2014, 3:55 p.m.)
> 
> 
> Review request for Dolphin.
> 
> 
> Bugs: 323960
> http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=323960
> 
> 
> Repository: kde-baseapps
> 
> 
> Description
> -------
> 
> Add 2 shortcuts as described in
> https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=323960
> 
> 1. Copy current URL to Clipboard
> Default Shortcut: Ctrl-Alt-C
> 
> 2. Set current Url to the one in Clipboard
> Default Shortcut: Ctrl-Alt-D (Because Ctrl-Alt-V is occupied by Klipper, D could be \
> understood as "dispatch" maybe.. 
> 
> Diffs
> -----
> 
> dolphin/src/dolphinmainwindow.h 6b046c2 
> dolphin/src/dolphinmainwindow.cpp a4dbb6f 
> 
> Diff: https://git.reviewboard.kde.org/r/115357/diff/
> 
> 
> Testing
> -------
> 
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Yichao Zhou
> 
> 


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<blockquote style="margin-left: 1em; border-left: 2px solid #d0d0d0; padding-left: 10px;">
 <p style="margin-top: 0;">On January 28th, 2014, 3:58 p.m. UTC, <b>Frank Reininghaus</b> \
wrote:</p>  <blockquote style="margin-left: 1em; border-left: 2px solid #d0d0d0; padding-left: \
10px;">  <pre style="white-space: pre-wrap; white-space: -moz-pre-wrap; white-space: -pre-wrap; \
white-space: -o-pre-wrap; word-wrap: break-word;">First of all, thanks for the patch!

To quote my comment https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=323960#c3 :

&quot;...this is one of the cases where I wonder if this feature is really useful enough that \
it justifies adding code which must be maintained in the future, and adding another action that \
makes the shortcuts dialog harder to use (I admit that it&#39;s a big mess not not very useable \
already).&quot;</pre>  </blockquote>




 <p>On January 28th, 2014, 4:03 p.m. UTC, <b>Frank Reininghaus</b> wrote:</p>
 <blockquote style="margin-left: 1em; border-left: 2px solid #d0d0d0; padding-left: 10px;">
  <pre style="white-space: pre-wrap; white-space: -moz-pre-wrap; white-space: -pre-wrap; \
white-space: -o-pre-wrap; word-wrap: break-word;">Hm, I shouldn&#39;t have copied the typo from \
the comment (&quot;not not&quot; -&gt; &quot;and not&quot;):

&quot;...this is one of the cases where I wonder if this feature is really useful enough that \
it justifies adding code which must be maintained in the future, and adding another action that \
makes the shortcuts dialog harder to use (I admit that it&#39;s a big mess and not very useable \
already).&quot;</pre>  </blockquote>





 <p>On January 28th, 2014, 4:21 p.m. UTC, <b>Yichao Zhou</b> wrote:</p>
 <blockquote style="margin-left: 1em; border-left: 2px solid #d0d0d0; padding-left: 10px;">
  <pre style="white-space: pre-wrap; white-space: -moz-pre-wrap; white-space: -pre-wrap; \
white-space: -o-pre-wrap; word-wrap: break-word;">Well.  I really like this feature...

IMHO, adding 2 more actions really will not make shortcuts dialog much harder to use.  See, we \
already have had more than 70 actions there.  Add 2 extra options will at most cost us about 3% \
increase of entropy even if they are totally useless.

For the maintenance overhead, this patch only adds 70 lines of code, most of which is the \
declaration.  I think it is unlikely that any part of it will be modified in the future.

Anyway.  I think that&#39;s all what I can do.  If main developers really do not will to merge \
it, let&#39;s just leave it here.</pre>  </blockquote>








</blockquote>

<pre style="white-space: pre-wrap; white-space: -moz-pre-wrap; white-space: -pre-wrap; \
white-space: -o-pre-wrap; word-wrap: break-word;">If you look at the hundreds of wishlist \
reports at bugs.kde.org, you will find the sentences &quot;I really like this feature&quot; and \
&quot;I don&#39;t think that this little change will make Dolphin much harder to use&quot; very \
frequently. And yes, many of these wishes could be implemented with less than 100 lines. Every \
single request may look quite harmless, but if a considerable number of them was implemented, \
their effects on usability and code complexity would add up, and then they would not look so \
harmless any more.

Therefore, the question if a feature is really important enough for a considerable part of our \
user base to justify these (potentially bad) side effects must be evaluated for every single \
feature before we can consider to add it.

For the feature which is under discussion here, we have one single user (you) who wants the \
feature, and IMHO, this is by far not enough to justify a non-trivial change in the \
application. Sorry about that.

That being said, I acknowledge that people will always have ideas how Dolphin could be modified \
to better suit their workflows. Probably the best solution for everyone would be to enable \
users to add functionality to Dolphin.

Christoph suggested in your wishlist report to make it possible to assign shortcuts to service \
menu entries. This approach might have some problems though, e.g., that there are \
KAbstractFileItemAction plugins which create (possibly multiple) actions at runtime. This would \
make it impossible to assign any shortcuts to these actions in advance. Moreover, there would \
always be an ambiguity concerning &quot;apply the action to the selected items/the current \
item&quot; and &quot;apply the action to the view URL&quot;.

An alternative solution might be a way to assign shortcuts to external applications, and \
optionally pass either the URL which is shown in the view, or the URL of the selected items or \
the current item on the command line. You could then easily implement your wish without any \
further changes in Dolphin by assigning the new shortcut to an application that copies its \
command line argument(s) to the clipboard.

I&#39;m not sure what would be the best way to expose such a functionality to the user though, \
and I&#39;m not even sure if this makes any sense at all. Maybe one could start a discussion \
about this issue on the usability mailing list.</pre> <br />










<p>- Frank</p>


<br />
<p>On January 28th, 2014, 3:55 p.m. UTC, Yichao Zhou wrote:</p>








<table bgcolor="#fefadf" width="100%" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="8" style="background-image: \
url('https://git.reviewboard.kde.org/static/rb/images/review_request_box_top_bg.ab6f3b1072c9.png'); \
background-position: left top; background-repeat: repeat-x; border: 1px black solid;">  <tr>
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<div>Review request for Dolphin.</div>
<div>By Yichao Zhou.</div>


<p style="color: grey;"><i>Updated Jan. 28, 2014, 3:55 p.m.</i></p>







<div style="margin-top: 1.5em;">
 <b style="color: #575012; font-size: 10pt; margin-top: 1.5em;">Bugs: </b>


 <a href="http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=323960">323960</a>


</div>



<div style="margin-top: 1.5em;">
 <b style="color: #575012; font-size: 10pt;">Repository: </b>
kde-baseapps
</div>


<h1 style="color: #575012; font-size: 10pt; margin-top: 1.5em;">Description </h1>
 <table width="100%" bgcolor="#ffffff" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="10" style="border: 1px \
solid #b8b5a0">  <tr>
  <td>
   <pre style="margin: 0; padding: 0; white-space: pre-wrap; white-space: -moz-pre-wrap; \
white-space: -pre-wrap; white-space: -o-pre-wrap; word-wrap: break-word;">Add 2 shortcuts as \
described in https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=323960

1. Copy current URL to Clipboard
  Default Shortcut: Ctrl-Alt-C

2. Set current Url to the one in Clipboard
  Default Shortcut: Ctrl-Alt-D (Because Ctrl-Alt-V is occupied by Klipper, D could be \
understood as &quot;dispatch&quot; maybe..</pre>  </td>
 </tr>
</table>



<h1 style="color: #575012; font-size: 10pt; margin-top: 1.5em;">Diffs</b> </h1>
<ul style="margin-left: 3em; padding-left: 0;">

 <li>dolphin/src/dolphinmainwindow.h <span style="color: grey">(6b046c2)</span></li>

 <li>dolphin/src/dolphinmainwindow.cpp <span style="color: grey">(a4dbb6f)</span></li>

</ul>

<p><a href="https://git.reviewboard.kde.org/r/115357/diff/" style="margin-left: 3em;">View \
Diff</a></p>







  </td>
 </tr>
</table>








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