The view displays all files and folders in the current folder. These items can be accessed or manipulated in different ways:

Dolphin remembers the history of visited folders. To navigate backward or forward in the history, the corresponding buttons in the toolbar can be used:

The Back and Forward buttons in the toolbar can be used to navigate in the history.

If you click with the middle mouse button the item in the history is opened in a new tab thus keeping the current tab with its content.

The toolbar contains buttons to control the appearance of the view:

The buttons in the toolbar which control the appearance of the view.

All the settings discussed below and other options concerning, e.g. the sorting of the files in the current folder, can also be modified in the View menu and in the View Display Style dialog. By default, these settings are remembered for each folder separately. This behavior can be changed in the “General” section of the settings.

View Modes

The first three buttons in the above screenshot switch between Dolphin's view modes.

• In the Icons view, which is the default, files will be represented by an icon that visualizes the file type, and a folder icon will be shown for subfolders. The names of folders and files, and the items enabled in View → Additional Information, are displayed below the icons.

• The Compact view shows the folder contents as icons with the name beside it and the items enabled in View → Additional Information below the name. The items are grouped in columns similar to the Short View in the KDE file dialog.

• In the Details view, the folder contents are displayed as a detailed list which contains the name, size and last modification time of each item. Additional columns can be added by clicking a column header with the right mouse button.

  In the context menu of the header line, you can add or remove side padding by checking or unchecking the respective menu item and choose between a custom or automatic column width. Automatic width adjusts the width of all columns once to display the longest item in the column completely, except for the Name column where the extension is replaced by “...”

  The order of columns can be changed by drag and drop of column headers, except for the Name header, which is always the first column in this view.

  The details view allows you to view the current folder in a tree-like fashion if Expandable folders are enabled: Each subfolder of the current folder can be “expanded” or “collapsed” by clicking on the > or v icon next to it.

All view modes support grouping by the sort type selected in View → Sort by

There are several ways to select items in the view. Once a group of items is selected, all actions, such as Cut, Copy, Move to Trash, and drag and drop operations, affect all selected items.

In the “bread crumb” mode, which is the default, each folder name in the path to the current folder is a button which can be clicked to quickly open that folder. Moreover, clicking the “>” sign to the right of a folder opens a menu which allows you to quickly open a subfolder of that folder.

Location bar in bread crumb mode.

When in bread crumb mode, clicking in the gray area to the right of the path with the left mouse button switches the location bar to “editable” mode, in which the path can be edited using the keyboard. To switch back to bread crumb mode, click the check mark at the right of the location bar with the left mouse button.

Location bar in editable mode.

Using Kioslaves

If the location bar is empty in editable mode, a drop down box appears in front of the bar listing all available kioslaves on your system. Kioslaves are programs built into KDE which add support for many different protocols to Dolphin and other KDE applications.

For example with the “fish” kioslave Dolphin can be used to manage files and folders on a remote host that is accessible via SSH. To do this you would type fish://username@remotehost into the location bar. Similar remote file management can be done on remote hosts accessible via the FTP, NFS, SFTP, SMB (CIFS) or webdav protocols.

It is also possible to use the kioslaves drop down box to access System Settings, fonts, trash, other programs and devices attached to your computer. See the drop down box for the full list of capabilities available from kioslaves on your system.

List of available kioslaves.

If the Places panel is hidden; in both modes an additional icon in front of the path is displayed. This icon can be clicked with the left mouse button to open a menu which offers quick access to “places” and storage media. See the section about the Places Panel for details.

The context menu of the location bar offers actions to switch between the modes and to copy and paste the path using the clipboard. Check the last option in this context menu to display either the full path starting with the root folder of the file system or to display the path starting with the current places entry.

The Places panel is located at the left of the window by default. The Places panel shows any locations you have bookmarked. It also shows any disk or media attached to the computer, recently accessed items and allows you to search for certain type of files. The order of these entries can be changed by drag and drop.

The easiest way to add a folder to the Places panel is to drag it and drop it in the panel. Moreover, you can click inside the panel with the right mouse button and choose Add Entry... from the context menu. The first procedure creates a system wide bookmark, the second procedure can be used to add the current path of the location bar or any desired folder or device. A dialog opens where label, location and icon can be edited and the usage of this entry can be restricted to Dolphin.

A right mouse button click opens the context menu to edit, add, hide or remove entries and change the icon size to one of the predefined values or lock/unlock the panels.

The context menu has an action to open the entry in a new tab. Devices can be unmounted using the context menu.

The Information panel shows extended information about the selected items(s) or about the current folder or the file which is currently hovered over with the mouse, including size, type, and date of last modification. It also features a large preview of the selected item and allows you to assign a rating, tags, and comments to it.

The Folders panel shows a tree view structure of the file system. It only shows folders. Clicking a folder with the left mouse button opens this folder in the Dolphin view.

Use Limit to Home Directory to hide all folders from the tree view except your Home.

This panel contains a terminal. The terminal will open at the folder currently shown in the Dolphin view. Changing the folder in the active Dolphin view will update the working folder of the terminal. Changing the directory in the terminal will update the working folder in the Dolphin view. The terminal only works with local media.

To quickly create a bookmark in the Places panel for the current folder, right mouse button click in the work space and click Add to Places in the context menu.

Dolphin is capable of filtering files, i.e. showing only those items in the view whose name contains a given text. For example, if you wish to show only the MP3 files within a folder, you could filter for “.mp3”. This would then filter out all files whose name does not contain “.mp3”.

To filter files, first enable the filter bar, either by pressing Ctrl+I or via the menu: Edit → Filter.... You can then enter the text to be filtered for in the filter bar. The filter bar can be disabled either by pressing Esc, or with a left mouse button click on the Hide Filter Bar icon.

Dolphin is capable of searching for files and for content in files. If Ctrl+F is pressed or Edit → Search... is used, the Search bar will open already set up to search for files within the current folder and any sub-folders. Start to type into the find input box and the search starts immediately.

Dolphin searching files and for content in files.

The search is case insensitive, and does not require surrounding wildcards (*foo* and foo are equivalent), but you can use wildcards inside the search term. * will match zero or more characters, ? only one single character.

This feature can be used with running Baloo services; without these services a KIOSlave is launched to provide the search results.

The option from Everywhere with activated Baloo services searches in all indexed folders, without Baloo this option starts the search from the user's Home folder.

Dolphin searching with More Options.

Use the More Options button to extend the Search bar. This provides a very comfortable way for the user to shrink the number of search results.

To start a search select one or more file types (Documents, Audio, Video, Images), a time period, rating, and tag, if you have defined any via tag:foo in the input box.

It is possible to clear selection using the Clear Selection button.

Alternatively you can use these options in the Places panel together with the Filter bar to find files using Baloo or limit the search to files matching the filter expression.

Use the Save icon to save a search to the Search For section in the Places panel to quickly access it again in the future.

Use the More Search Tools drop-down list to select other search tools than Baloo.

A quick way to mount Storage Media is to click on the device in the Places panel. This will mount and open the device in Dolphin.

Dolphin is capable of undoing changes you have made to files. For example if you moved a file to the Trash, Dolphin can undo this and move it back to its original location. To undo an action, press Ctrl+Z or select Edit → Undo: (action name) in the menu, e.g. Undo: Rename.

Dolphin is capable of renaming a number of files at the same time. Each file will have the file name specified, including a number, e.g., Image1.jpg, Image2.jpg, Image3.jpg. This can be useful, e.g., for pictures taken with a digital camera.

If you wish to rename a batch of files, first select the files to be renamed. This can be done by pressing the left mouse button and drawing a rectangle around the files to be renamed before releasing it, or by holding Ctrl and clicking each file to be renamed (see Selecting Items in the View for more details on item selection). Then open the batch-rename dialog by pressing F2 or via the File menu: File → Rename...

Then enter the name you wish to give the files. The # character must be present within the name. The files will then be renamed, where the # character is replaced by a different consecutive number for each file.

If all file extensions in your selection are different, the name of all files can be changed without using a # placeholder while preserving the file extensions. This is e.g. useful to rename a video file and all associated subtitle files, which have the same filename, but different extensions.

If the Kompare application is installed, you can use it to see the differences between two files or folders.

First select the two files or folders to be compared. Then launch the Kompare application via the Tools menu: Tools → Compare Files. Kompare will then open showing the differences between the files or folders.

The View Display Style Dialog.

The View Display Style dialog can be used to quickly modify the view display styles for many folders at once. This is done for the current folder, for the current folder including all subfolders, or even for all folders, depending on the choice made in the Apply to section.

If Use as default view settings is enabled, the chosen view properties will also be used for all folders which do not have customized view properties yet.