Konqueror is looking for a maintainer

For quite some time now (OK, many years...) I haven't had time for Konqueror. KDE Frameworks 5 and Qt 5 have kept me quite busy.

It's time to face the facts: Konqueror needs a new maintainer.

This is a good time to publish the thoughts we had many years ago about a possible new GUI for Konqueror.

Kévin Ottens, Nuno Pinheiro and myself had a meeting (at some Akademy, many years ago) where we thought about how Konqueror's GUI could be improved to be cleaner and more intuitive, while keeping the idea of Konqueror being the universal navigator, i.e. the swiss-army knife that includes file management, web browsing, document viewing, and more. This is what makes it different from rekonq and dolphin, for instance.

So, if you're interested in Konqueror and you want to keep it alive, please consider taking over its development; whether the ideas below sound good to you or not. This is no obligation, just a brain-storming that could prove useful for a future redesign of Konqueror's UI.

The first task is much simpler anyway: it needs to be ported to KF 5 and Qt 5.

1) Definition of the target user group:

• Users who prefer to stay within the same application as much as possible (which includes both those who don't like major changes, and those who prefer a single window over new windows and apps being started for every type of document)
• All web users (from one webpage to many at the same time).
• Heavy content consumers (local and remote)

2) Workflow diagrams

2.1) Navigation to a document in a known location Pre-requisite: a "starting point" selector is available

• Step 1: choosing a starting point
• Step 2: navigating to that starting point in the main view
• Step 3: when reaching the document, its contents are displayed, still in the main view.
• Optional step 4: for edit the document, an easily accessible button is available.

2.2) File management during navigation During step 2 above, the user might notice files that need renaming, deleting, moving, etc. Moving and copying is especially interesting, we made a list of the possible ways to do that, and kept: Copy/Paste, Splitted views, Dropping on a tab, Dropping on a breadcrumb while discarding the sidebar folder tree.

This also led to a new concept in addition, for the following workflow:

• Step 1: Select files
• Step 2: Trigger cut or copy action
• Step 3: A "clipboard" window appears on the side of the current window, showing an icon for the copied files.
• Optional step 4: drag more files to the clipboard, even from other locations, which creates more "groups of files" icons in the clipboard.
• Step 5: Navigate to the target location
• Step 6: Trigger the paste action to paste all the files from the clipboard, or drag individual groups of files from the clipboard to the intended location.

This has the advantage that no splitting or sidebar is necessary within konqueror. The clipboard window (inspired by the concept of a shelf in NeXT) offers a temporary area for holding the files while we are moving from the source location to the target location within the main view. Note that the clipboard would have a visible label "Copy" or "Move", depending on the action in step 2 which made it appear. This makes it clear that the files dropped in step 4 will also be copied or moved, and saves asking the user again at every drop in step 4, as well as asking in the final drop in step 6.

This concept could even be made KDE-wide; whenever the user uses "copy" or "cut" in an application, the clipboard window would appear (at a fixed location, in this idea, not attached to the application window) and an icon for the copied or cut data would appear in the clipboard window. On the other hand it might be annoying when using a quick Ctrl+C Ctrl+V in a word processor, so it should probably not appear automatically in most applications. But for files it would be nice if it appeared automatically, because this makes the feature very easy to discover, compared to a "Tools / Show Clipboard Window" that nobody would use. (Another issue is that the workspace-global window might appear on top of the window where you wanted to copy or paste... this problem doesn't happen in the initial idea of attaching to the konqueror window (a bit like a Mac slide panel or whatever it's called). It could appear on whichever side there is room for it, or the window could move to make room for it).

The nice thing is that this is actually very easy to implement, it fits exactly the QMimeData/QClipboard concepts. But let's put this aside for now, it's a bit separate from the main idea of this document. It was mostly a way to provide a solution for the loss of sidebar folder tree, currently used by people who move files to other directories. Meanwhile another solution for these users is to split and switch to "tree view" mode, which konqueror would offer again (like the file dialog does, and unlike dolphin). (However that's a tree of files and dirs, not a tree of dirs).

2.3) Previewing many files from the same directory

For fast multiple previews, konqueror currently has a very hidden but very nice feature: split+link+lock. Since it's impossible to discover, these features would be removed from the GUI, and instead a single action would be offered for these three steps. A good name still has to be found, something like "Splitted Preview". The workflow would be:

• Step 1: Navigate to directory
• Step 2: Trigger "Splitted preview" action. The window is split vertically, and the right view shows a single label like "click on files to preview them here".
• Step 3: Click on a file in the left view The file is embedded into the right view.