Making KDE's Konqueror Obey You

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I am a proud KDE-lover, and I think Konqueror is the best file manager there is. It’s a pretty good Web browser too, though it tends to gag on certain script-heavy, poorly-scripted sites. But that seems a rational response–spit ’em out and move on.

Making Konqueror’s Default View What You Want

Getting back to Konqueror the file manager. As wonderful as it is, a common complaint is setting the default view to anything other than Icon View. Sure, you can change it with the little drop-down menu, you can save your carefully-customize File Management profile a hundred times, but it will always revert to Icon View. Fortunately there is a fix for this, though a convoluted and obscure one. Go into Settings –> Configure Konqueror, and then scroll down and click on “File Associations”. Click on “inode” (now that’s intuitive!), and then click on “directory”. Click on the “Embedding” tab, and under “Services Preference Order” move whatever view you like to the top. I like Detailed List View; you may choose whichever one you prefer. Save your changes and you should be all set.

PCLinuxOS requires a different fix, which you can find at Make Konqueror use your default view mode in new tabs, plus there are other helpful comments. Hurrah for helpful bloggers!

How to Open KDE the File Manager or KDE the Web Browser

Your favorite Linux distribution may not include menu icons for both of these, and a lot of new KDE users get frustrated because they only have a launcher for one or the other. However, you’re not stuck because there are many different ways to get there. First take notice of Settings –> Load View Profile. By default there should be File Management and Web Browsing, so you can open either one after Konqueror is open.

You may also open it to your desired profile from the command line with konqueror –profile filemanagement or konqueror –profile webbrowsing. How do you what the profile names are? Run

$ konqueror --profiles filemanagement webbrowsing split

How do I know all this? From reading man konqueror. You won’t see split because that is a custom profile that I created.

Now you know which command to use to create a menu icon. Open the KDE menu editor by right-clicking on the blue K, or run kmenuedit from a command line. Click New Item. You need only three things: a name that you make up, the correct command, and a nice icon which you can find by clicking on the icon box. Figure 1 shows you what it looks like.

Customizing Profiles

You may also easily customize your profiles. For example, I want Konqueror the file manager to always open at the same directory. So I open it to that directory, then do “Settings –> Save View Profile File Management”. Checking “Save URLs in view profile” makes sure it will always open to my chosen directory. You can customize Konqueror to your heart’s content and then save it in a profile, and you can even create customized profiles under different names for all occasions. This works for both Web and file manager profiles.

Carla Schroder is the author of the Linux Cookbook and the Linux Networking Cookbook, and the managing editor of LinuxPlanet.

This article was first published on LinuxPlanet.com.