Dolphin 26.08, and KIO perf improvements

Dolphin 26.08 has been released. Here is more of what changed in it, and in the KIO framework underneath it.

The version of KIO that shipped alongside Dolphin 26.04 was 6.25. The one that ships alongside 26.08 is 6.29, four framework releases and 294 commits later. A fair part of this post is about that, because the largest performance change of this cycle is not in Dolphin at all. If you only read one thing, read Making KIO copy many files fast, which is the story behind why copying a folder of small files in 26.08 takes less than half the time it did in 26.04.

New features

Grouping is no longer tied to sorting. Ramil Nurmanov added an explicit group role, so grouping by type no longer forces you to sort by type as well. The old "Show in Groups" toggle is replaced by a "Group By" menu, which lets you turn grouping off, keep the old "Same as Sort" behaviour, or pick a criterion outright. Inside each group the normal sort role is still used as a secondary key. (989c0f4f0)

The filter bar tells you what it is doing. Alessio Bonfiglio replaced the hidden auto-detecting regex behaviour with an explicit mode selector offering Plain Text, Glob and Regular Expression, plus a case-sensitivity toggle. The old behaviour tried to guess: typing a name containing *, ? or [ silently switched the bar to a regular expression, which made a file genuinely named [draft].txt impossible to filter for. An invalid expression now turns the bar red instead of quietly doing something else. (3084a4e11)

A "Folder Name" column in the details view, by Jussi Räsänen, closing a request from 2021. It is most useful when a search or an expanded tree puts files from several folders on screen at once. (4a7be9f25)

Per-folder zoom, by Wagner Soares. When you are not using global view properties, the zoom level is now remembered per folder like the other view properties are. (0f7a9c681)

"Focus Other View", by Felix Ernst. The "Switch between views with Tab key" setting is gone, replaced by a real action you can bind to whatever you like. It moves focus to the inactive split view, and opens a split if there is not one yet. (12b4a8a91)

Close tabs to the left or right, by Ramil Nurmanov. (91e7c0c1e)

A button to restore view properties to their defaults, which I added for the per-folder view properties case. It enables and disables itself depending on whether the current folder already matches the defaults. (70f34211c)

Type-ahead feedback in the status bar, by Felix Ernst. As you type, the status bar shows the keys you have typed and which file name they selected, so a type-ahead that lands somewhere unexpected is no longer silent. (1e13c6abb)

The terminal panel can be resynchronised with F5, by Antti Savolainen, closing bug 510557. When a foreground program is running in the panel, the terminal and the view can drift apart. Konsole does not signal when that program exits, so responding to F5 is the practical answer. (07baa7bb6)

KDE Connect integration, by Kai Uwe Broulik: an "Open KDE Connect" button when browsing the kdeconnect scheme (d5903bd81), and a proper placeholder for a KDE Connect folder (dfef28748).

Session restore for the first instance, by Sergey Katunin, closing bug 464693. If Dolphin is not already running and something launches it with --new-window, as browsers and Kate do, the session is restored rather than discarded. (173794ce1)

Behaviour changes

These are the changes most likely to surprise you, so they are worth naming explicitly.

• Create New Folder is now two actions. Ctrl+Shift+N and the context menu entry shared one action, so the menu advertised a shortcut that did something subtly different: the shortcut creates in the viewed directory, the menu entry in the folder you clicked. They are separate actions now, and the context menu one has no default shortcut. (705e366aa)
• "Empty Trash" moved in the context menu, by Antti Savolainen, closing bug 518713. It now sits with the other destructive actions rather than next to harmless ones. The reporter had been emptying the trash while reaching for something else. (7d81e3092)
• "Open Terminal Here" only appears for folders, not for files, by Brijesh krishna. (8a9f7d9d4)
• The play arrow over video previews in the Information Panel is gone, by Ryan Nosurname. There is already a play button and a seek bar directly beneath it. (71f8db089)
• Icon overlays are drawn at a fixed size rather than composited into the thumbnail and rescaled with it (bug 498211). Emblem size was previously inconsistent from file to file, because each thumbnail was rescaled by its own factor, and slightly cropped at fractional display scaling. (63f21036e)
• Special folders keep their saved view properties even with global view properties enabled, by Pan Zhang (bug 520089, 2e665e1b5).
• Names like file.2.txt sort naturally, by Pan Zhang (bug 411707, 0d10eff37).

Who wrote it

Counting commits that are new in 26.08 and not already in a 26.04.x release, and leaving the translation robot out of it:

The busiest by a wide margin:

Commit counts and line counts do not rank people the same way. Ramil Nurmanov and Alessio Bonfiglio wrote two commits each and still added more lines than anyone except the top two, because grouping by a separate criterion and the filter bar modes each arrived whole. Ryan Nosurname's single commit is the opposite shape: removing the video preview play arrow takes away 43 lines and adds none.

Thirteen people landed their first Dolphin commit this cycle: Antti Savolainen, Areeb Faisal, Brijesh krishna, Evgeniy Harchenko, Filip Fila, Florian RICHER, Jussi Räsänen, Ketal Wang, Oleksandr Bondar, Ramil Nurmanov, Ryan Nosurname, Sebastian Englbrecht and Wagner Soares. Kudos to them! Several are long-standing KDE contributors who had simply not touched this repository before, so read it as new to Dolphin rather than new to KDE.

The other 110 commits were mainly translation commits. Thank you, translators!

Bugs fixed

Nineteen bugs are fixed in 26.08 that were not already fixed in a 26.04.x point release. Ten of them are the changes described above, so here are the other nine:

Two regressions worth knowing about

Icons could be missing entirely. On a freshly opened view every item drew a blank where its icon should be, and it stayed that way until the view mode was switched or the zoom slider moved (bug 523228). A regression from per-folder zoom, fixed in 9c652faca. That fix brought one of its own, turning previews off in icons view rendering at 16 pixels rather than the 32 that mode is set to (bug 524606), fixed in 57c6b10e1. Both are on the release/26.08 branch and ship in Dolphin 26.08.1, due in the first half of September 2026.

Service submenus disappeared from the context menu. Entries that a service menu file groups into a submenu were missing from the context menu, in any application that builds one with KFileItemActions, Dolphin included (bug 524239). A regression from 148b9253d in 6.29, fixed by Luis Bocanegra in 774defb94, which ships in KDE Frameworks 6.30, due in the first week of September 2026.

Neither was found by a test, and both have one now: dolphinitemlistviewtest, which is new, and three cases in dolphinviewtest for the per-folder cache, and testServiceMenuSubmenuActions with a submenu.desktop fixture in KIO.

Closing

If you want to help, the leak and lifetime work above is a good way in, and so is picking a bug from the list. The KIO copy path still has more in it than 6.29 ships: the batching that closes most of the remaining gap to cp is written and measured in Making KIO copy many files fast but not yet finished.

That's all, folks.