KIO – Kai Uwe's Blog

Nifty Dialogs

As explained in one of my previous blog posts where I revamped the unresponsive window dialog, KWin isn’t really designed to show regular desktop windows of its own. It instead relies on helper programs to display messages. In case of the “no border” hint, it just launched kdialog, a small utility for displaying various message boxes from shell scripts. This however came with a couple of caveats that have all been addressed now:

KWrite (simple text editor) window without window border. Ontop a dialog “You have selected to show a window without its border. Without the border, you will not be able to enable the border again using the mouse: use the window menu instead, using the Alt+F3 keyboard shortcut”, buttons “OK” and “Restore Border” — Setting no border now lets you restore it in case you really don’t have a keyboard

Introducing KIO AFC

A KIO worker for accessing iOS devices through the Apple File Conduit service.

Dolphin file manager showing the directory contents of an iPhone. Folders include "Apps", "Books", "DCIM" (Camera), "Documents", "Downloads", and 8 more. — Dolphin browsing the contents of an attached iPhone

While there have been several projects like this for both KDE 4 and Frameworks 5, this one has been written on top of the latest KIO classes and will be officially part of the next KDE Gear release. It is now part of the kio-extras module, which also houses the Android counterpart for transferring files over the MTP protocol.

Reunited after a decade

It’s been more than ten years since Dolphin, KDE’s versatile file manager, introduced its own custom QGraphicsView-based view engine. With that came more detailed view modes with grouping support, animated transitions, and a new places panel with sections. Unfortunately, it is all based on a now long-abandoned “Itemviews NG” project, and is inherently incompatible with Qt’s traditional model-view code used elsewhere in KDE.

Dolphin's (file manager) main window with sidebar of places (Home, Pictures, Documents, Downloads, Music, etc) — Looks virtually the same, doesn’t it?

A few weeks ago I sat down and over the course of a few evenings I ported Dolphin back to using the KFilePlacesView provided by KIO which is used in the Open and Save dialogs, among other places.