- Dolphin
- Installation
- Compare files
- File previews
- View audio CDs
- Single click to open folders/files
- Usage
- Open terminal
- KIO Slaves
- Troubleshooting
- Device names shown as «X GiB Harddrive»
- Moving files into trash takes long on external drives
- Transparent fonts
- Crashes on mounted SMB share
- Icons not showing
- Icons are too big
- Mismatched folder view background colors
- Zsh profile not loading in integrated terminal
- GTK applications are not using Dolphin
- Unable to install any context menu plugins
- See also
- SpaceFM
- Installation
- Usage
- File searches
- Desktop management
- Mounting remote hosts
- Tips and tricks
- Open archive in app instead of extracting
- Show custom context menu command only on files/folders
- Troubleshooting
- Columns are not resizeable
- Segmentation faults
Dolphin
Dolphin is the default file manager of KDE. For the video game console emulator, see Dolphin emulator.
Installation
For version control and Dropbox support, install dolphin-plugins . To enable the relevant plugin go to Settings > Configure Dolphin. > Services.
Compare files
The Compare files dialog depends on kompare . Alternatively, you can compare files in any diff tool (such as meld ) by selecting two files, right clicking, selecting open with, and then the diff tool.
File previews
- kdegraphics-thumbnailers : Image files, PDFs and Blender application files.
- kimageformats : Gimp .xcf files
- libheif : HEIF files
- qt5-imageformats : .webp, .tiff, .tga, .jp2 files
- resvgAUR : Fast and accurate SVG image thumbnails
- kdesdk-thumbnailers : Plugins for the thumbnailing system
- ffmpegthumbs : Video files (based on ffmpeg)
- raw-thumbnailerAUR : .raw files
- taglib : Audio files
- kde-thumbnailer-apkAUR : Android package files
Enable preview showing of required file type in Settings > Configure Dolphin. > General > Previews.
To enable heif/heic image thumbnails, edit /usr/share/kservices5/imagethumbnail.desktop by adding image/heif; to the line which starts with MimeType= .
Note that heif/heic thumbnails will be enabled by default on versions of kio-extras after 21.12 (see the link to this bug report for further explanation).
View audio CDs
Support for audio CDs is provided by the kio extension audiocd-kio .
Single click to open folders/files
To configure Single-Click to open items, you need to install and run «qt5ct» from the terminal, which will then give you the option to enable Single-Click (and change the theme etc.) from the ‘Interface’ tab.
Usage
Open terminal
Dolphin and other KDE applications use konsole by default. To change the default terminal emulator, run kcmshell5 componentchooser and select Terminal Emulator > Other. .
If it is preferred to launch tmux along with a terminal emulator inside Dolphin, simply type in terminalname -e tmux after selecting Other. .
Some users will not have the module installed. Instead, the default terminal can be changed by modifying the kdeglobals configuration ~/.config/kdeglobals , and adding TerminalApplication=terminalname under the [General] tab. Note, it is likely that this method will not make the internal Dolphin terminal window (opened with F4 ) use the terminal specified in the kdeglobals configuration.
KIO Slaves
Dolphin uses KIO slaves for network access, trash and other functionality, unlike GTK file managers which use GVFS. Available protocols are shown in the location bar (editable mode) [1]. To quickly bookmark them, right-click in the workspace, and select «Add to Places».
You can install KIO slaves manually. For example, to browse your Google Drive in Dolphin, install kio-gdrive .
Troubleshooting
Device names shown as «X GiB Harddrive»
Create a filesystem label, or a partition label, and Dolphin will show this label in the device list instead of the size. See Persistent block device naming#by-label.
Moving files into trash takes long on external drives
For moving files into the Trash, it is required that the user has exclusive access rights to the Trash. The rationale being that you do not want that others can see what you deleted. For that, a folder such as .Trash-1000/ is created on the external drive, with permission mode 700 .
If the correct access permissions cannot be set, dolphin will (unlike GNOME) move the files to the trash in the home directory, which takes time.
To mount USB-Sticks / external HDDs, Dolphin uses Udisks. FAT32 / EXFAT / NTFS do not support UNIX file permission, udisk mounts them by default with mode 755. To configure udisks to mount these drives with mode 700, have a look at the file /etc/udisks2/mount_options.conf.example . Copy the file (the name should end with .conf), uncomment the relevant part and add for the three filesystems to the lines with xyz_defaults the options fmask=177,dmask=077 .
Transparent fonts
Fonts in selection frames may become transparent when using the GTK Qt style. Native Qt styles such as Cleanlooks and Oxygen are unaffected.
Crashes on mounted SMB share
Icons not showing
If icons are not displayed in Dolphin, install and run qt5ct , choose one icon theme at the Icon Theme tab, and Apply.
If icons are still not displayed in Dolphin, set the QT_QPA_PLATFORMTHEME variable to qt5ct in your xprofile. Alternatively, start Dolphin with the platform theme flag:
$ dolphin --platformtheme qt5ct
Also make sure to install and inherit a fallback icon theme like hicolor or Adwaita when you are using an uncommon, incomplete icon theme.
Icons are too big
If icons are too big on Dolphin outside of a KDE environment, start it with:
XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP=KDE KDE_SESSION_VERSION=5 QT_AUTO_SCREEN_SCALE_FACTOR=0 dolphin
Mismatched folder view background colors
When running Dolphin under something other than Plasma, it is possible the background color in the folder view pane will not match the system Qt theme. This is because Dolphin reads the folder view’s background color from the [Colors:View] section in ~/.config/kdeglobals . Change the following line to the RGB value you prefer (it may be given in the form #RRGGBB or R,G,B):
. [Colors:View] BackgroundNormal=#2E2E2E .
If you get a blue border around the folder view pane (if you are in split view it will only be around the focused pane), you may get rid of it by applying the fusion-fixes.qss style sheet via the qt5ct app. This answer describes what to do to get the adwaita dark theme working for dolphin under Gnome.
Alternatively, use kvantum to manage your Qt5 theming. For instructions on usage see the Kvantum project homepage.
Zsh profile not loading in integrated terminal
The factual accuracy of this article or section is disputed.
Reason: This issue is not limited to just Zsh; konsole (and thus konsolepart) does not launch a login shell by default. zprofile should be loaded by the display manager when starting the session (like it is done by SDDM[4][5]) not by the terminal emulator. (Discuss in Talk:Dolphin)
If your zsh profile is not loading, try editing your current profile. Right-click on the integrated terminal then Edit Current Profile. and edit the launch command to /bin/zsh —login
GTK applications are not using Dolphin
Unable to install any context menu plugins
When you go to Dolphin menu Settings > Configure Dolphin > Context Menu > Download New Services and try to install any service, you get this error message:
/usr/bin/servicemenuinstaller: error while loading shared libraries: libpackagekitqt5.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
This can be solved by installing packagekit-qt5 . Then restart Dolphin.
See also
SpaceFM
Note: The project has not seen any commits since 2018-03-04: development is abandoned. A fork is actively maintained, but not packaged yet in AUR.
SpaceFM (a fork of PCManFM) is a lightweight, highly configurable, desktop-independent multi-panel tabbed file and desktop manager. It features a built-in virtual file system, a udev-based device manager, a customisable menu system, and Bash integration.
Installation
Or you can use spacefm-gtk2 AUR package if you need a GTK 2 version.
Usage
File searches
SpaceFM provides a built-in file search feature similar to catfish :
Desktop management
SpaceFM includes a lightweight desktop manager. [1]. It replaces the desktop menu, adds desktop icons, and sets the wallpaper.
To restore the native window manager menu, open Desktop preferences
and enable the Right click shows WM menu option in the Desktop tab. Consider adding the above command to a keybind and/or the native desktop menu for easy access.
To run SpaceFM as a daemon without it managing the desktop [2], use:
How SpaceFM may be autostarted as a daemon process or to manage the desktop for a standalone window manager will depend on the window manager itself. Should a window manager not provide an autostart file, edit xinitrc or xprofile.
Mounting remote hosts
SpaceFM supports mounting remote hosts via udevil. To add a remote host, add the access URL into the URL bar. A terminal window should pop up showing the mounting process which is useful for error tracing.
An overview of the supported remote hosts is available in the udevil help. For example to mount a remote FTP server:
ftp://user:pass@sys.domain/share
Tips and tricks
Open archive in app instead of extracting
By default, SpaceFM is configured to extract an archive when double clicking on it. If you instead want to open it with your default archive manager such as file-roller , then select an archive, right-click for context menu, and then: Open / Archive default / Open With App
Show custom context menu command only on files/folders
If you have a custom context menu command that should be only shown on selection of files or folders, then add the following rules to Menu Item Properties -> Context :
MIME Type equals true File Is Dir equals true File Is Text equals true
Troubleshooting
Columns are not resizeable
This should only happen on the first start of SpaceFM (GTK 2 version). [3]
Segmentation faults
If SpaceFM crashes with errors such as:
localhost kernel: [245086.687050] spacefm[30684]: segfault at 3e8000003e8 ip 00007fc95c586866 sp 00007fffb1dc9cc0 error 4 in libgtk-x11-2.0.so.0.2400.24[7fc95c446000+435000]
SpaceFM uses many different GUI elements, and is thus suspectible to a malfunctioning theme (especially in GTK 3). Try a different theme such as Raleigh (default theme). To do so for SpaceFM only, in GTK 2:
GTK2_RC_FILES=/usr/share/themes/Raleigh/gtk-2.0/gtkrc spacefm