Bug 497664

Summary: Tuncate files names in the middle
Product: [Applications] dolphin Reporter: Maximilian Böhm <mabo>
Component: view-engine: details modeAssignee: Dolphin Bug Assignee <dolphin-bugs-null>
Status: CONFIRMED ---    
Severity: wishlist CC: akselmo, felixernst, kfm-devel, mabo, meven, nate
Priority: NOR Keywords: usability
Version: unspecified   
Target Milestone: ---   
Platform: Other   
OS: Linux   
Latest Commit: Version Fixed In:
Sentry Crash Report:

Description Maximilian Böhm 2024-12-18 23:15:49 UTC 
Tuncate files names in the middle

»One of my earliest UX wins was for Mac System 7. The Finder team wanted to truncate files names with '…' if it wouldn’t fit. I argued that too much critical info would be lost and suggested it be in the middle instead. The Finder team loved it and implemented it later that day. They were so easy to work with.

I'd totally forgotten about it until I overheard someone commenting it was an example of Apple's attention to detail. I'd didn't say anything at the time but yeah, that was me ;-) «
https://social.coop/@scottjenson/113676007029747942 (with screenshot)

Please implement this in Dolphin too! Looks so much better!
Comment 1 Nate Graham 2024-12-20 18:32:14 UTC 
Dolphin currently elides at the end of the file name, but before the extension, so that part never gets cut off. IIRC there was quite a lot of discussion in the recent past that resulted in this implementation.

However I can see from the image posted at that link that our current implementation would hide any information the user has added as an explicit suffix though, such as a year, an ordinal number, etc. Perhaps it would indeed be wiser to go for the simple option of eliding in the middle.
Comment 2 Felix Ernst 2024-12-21 10:54:37 UTC 
I agree that truncating in the middle is somewhat sensible. That being said, we can't really win here because it will always be mostly about assumptions which part of a file name string is the most important for the user to see and there will always be examples where we are doing the wrong thing. The wanted behaviour might also vary by culture and language e.g. because in some regions it might be normal to typically frontload information or something.

I'll set this as CONFIRMED for now because I would not mind if anyone worked on this, however I would like whoever works on this to first search up on the previous discussion on this topic that Nate mentioned and explain why those discussions resulted in a sub-optimal solution.