Dolphin

Related articles
File manager functionality
KDE
udisks
Dolphin
is the default file manager of
KDE
. For the video game console emulator, see
Dolphin emulator
.
Installation
Install
the
dolphin
package.
Extensions
ark
: adds
archiving and compression
support
audiocd-kio
: adds audio CD support
baloo
: extends tagging support (see
#File tagging
)
dolphin-plugins
: adds
Git
,
Bazaar
,
Mercurial
and
Dropbox
support and some
mounting
actions
kio-admin
: allows managing files as administrator
kio-gdrive
: adds Google Drive support (see
#KIO slaves
)
kompare
: adds the
Compare files
dialog (Alternatively, select two files:
{right click} > Open With > {your diff tool}
.)
konsole
: integrated terminal panel
Note
Some extensions need to be enabled in either
Settings > Configure Dolphin... > Context Menu
or
Menu Icon > Configure > Configure Dolphin... > Context Menu
.
File previews
ffmpegthumbs
: video files (based on ffmpeg)
icoutils
:
*.ico
,
*.cur
files and embedded
*.exe
icons
kde-thumbnailer-apk
AUR
: android package files
kdegraphics-thumbnailers
: image files, PDFs and Blender
*.blend
files
kdesdk-thumbnailers
: plugins for the thumbnailing system (for development purposes only)
kimageformats
: Gimp
*.xcf
files,
*.heic
files (with
libheif
)
libappimage
: embedded
*.AppImage
icons
qt6-imageformats
:
*.webp
,
*.tiff
,
*.tga
,
*.jp2
files
raw-thumbnailer
AUR
:
*.raw
files
resvg
: fast and accurate SVG image thumbnails
taglib
: audio files
Note
Previews for specific file-types must be enabled in
Menu Icon > Configure > Configure Dolphin... > Interface > Previews
.
Previews may not work in fuse-based filesystems, such as
iOS
. A workaround is to copy files to a normal filesystem, then preview at that location.
To enable
resvg
instead of the built-in SVG thumbnailer, turn
off
SVG Images
.
Configuration
Single click to open folders/files
To configure Single-Click to open items, install and run KDE’s
systemsettings
and select the desired behavior under
Quick Settings > Clicking files or folders
.
Then run the following to respect the setting:
XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP=KDE dolphin
.
(see
[1]
)
Alternatively, install and run
qt6ct
from the terminal, which will then give you the option to enable Single-Click (and change the theme etc.) from the
Interface
tab.
If you use Kvantum theme engine - use
kvantum manager > Configure Active Theme > Miscellaneous > Click behavior
.
Change the default terminal emulator
Dolphin and other KDE applications use
konsole
by default.  To change the default terminal emulator, run
kcmshell6 componentchooser
and select your Terminal Emulator or write the launch command into the selection field in the
Other...
popup. (The second option will create a new local
desktop entry
for this command.)
For example, to launch
tmux
in
alacritty
inside Dolphin, type
alacritty -e tmux
after selecting
Other...
.
The setting can also be directly changed by modifying the configuration file
~/.config/kdeglobals
. For example, to use alacritty add in the
[General]
section:
TerminalApplication=alacritty
TerminalService=Alacritty.desktop
Where
TerminalApplication
takes a command and
TerminalService
a desktop entry (TerminalService seems to be optional).
Note, that this does not influence the terminal within the dolphin window (opened with
F4
).
The factual accuracy of this article or section is disputed.
Reason:
This does (only) work in KDE and might not be dolphin related and might not work in many other WMs. (Discuss in
Talk:Dolphin
)
To change the internal Dolphin terminal window go to
Keyboard > Shortcuts
and choose your preferred terminal and set the
Launch
shortcut to
Ctrl+Alt+T
, overriding Konsole's shortcut. Note that terminals opened this way might not follow the background color as specified in the terminal's configuration file, but otherwise should be identical to an instance launched in a window.
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)
[2]
. 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
.
Tips and tricks
File tagging
Dolphin provides extensive support for file tagging. Add tags to a file by right-clicking the file and selecting
Assign Tags
. Tags on a file can be viewed in the
Properties
menu or in the
Information panel
. To show tags in a column in the
Details
View Mode, right-click on any header and choose
Tags
from the menu.
Dolphin uses the
user.xdg.tags
extended attribute
to store tags directly along with each file.
Baloo
indexes these tags into its own database to allow for faster searching and maintains a list of all known tags.
Activate
Baloo
to show a list of all indexed tags within the Places panel and make searching for files by their tags possible.
Hiding custom files/directories
Files/directories can be hidden by creating a
.hidden
file (in the same directory) that contains the names of the files/directories that should be hidden (one per line).
Creating custom service menus
Custom service menu entries can be added to dolphin with special
*.desktop
files in one of the following Paths (see
[3]
):
~/.local/share/kio/servicemenus/
/usr/share/kio/servicemenus/
Note
Desktop entries
must
be executable to show up in dolphin!
gamemode.desktop
[Desktop Entry]
Type=Service
MimeType=application/*;
Actions=runWithGamemode

[Desktop Action runWithGamemode]
Name=Run with Gamemode
Name[de]=Mit Gamemode ausführen
Icon=input-gaming
Exec=gamemoderun %u
This adds a
Run with Gamemode
menu item on all
application
mime types
.
Tip
To create a servicemenu for all file-types, use the
application/octet-stream
mimetype.
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
.
(Background information:
[4]
,
[5]
)
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
See
Samba#Unable to overwrite files
.
Icons not showing
If icons are not displayed in Dolphin, install and run
qt6ct
, 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
qt6ct
in your
xprofile
. Alternatively, start Dolphin with the platform theme flag:
$ dolphin --platformtheme qt6ct
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=6
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):
~/.config/kdeglobals
...
[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 qt6ct app. This
answer
describes what  to do to get the adwaita dark theme working for dolphin under Gnome.
Alternatively, use
kvantum
to manage your Qt6 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
[6]
[7]
) 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
See
Uniform look for Qt and GTK applications#Consistent file dialog under KDE Plasma
.
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: libpackagekitqt6.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
This can be solved by installing
packagekit-qt6
. Then restart Dolphin.
Dolphin cannot find applications (when running under another window manager)
This can be resolved by installing the
archlinux-xdg-menu
package and running:
$ XDG_MENU_PREFIX=arch- kbuildsycoca6 --noincremental
This updates the KService desktop-file system configuration cache (see
kbuildsycoca6(8)
), which many KDE-applications rely on for selecting desktop entries. The
--noincremental
argument is optional.
XDG_MENU_PREFIX
is needed, because
archlinux-xdg-menu
creates a
XDG Desktop Menu
with an
arch-
prefix (see
xdg-menu
).
The XDG Desktop Menu files can be found in
/etc/xdg/menus/*-applications.menu
.
Normally,
kbuildsycoca6
does not need to be manually installed as it is part of the
kservice
package, which is a dependency of
dolphin
.
Note
This solution only rebuilds the cache and does
not
keep it updated. (
pacman hooks
offer partial automation.
See here
)
See also
Wikipedia:Dolphin (file manager)
KDE userbase: Dolphin
The Dolphin Handbook