Version: (using KDE KDE 3.4.3) Installed from: SuSE RPMs To reproduce: 1. Control Center->KDE Components->File Associations 2. Select a file type 3. Click the icon in the right-hand pane 4. "Select Icon" dialog window pops up showing a preview of various system icons. 5. Click "Other icons" 6. Click "Browse" 7. "Open" dialog window pops up. Navigate to a directory containing lots of icons. The problem now is that the user is presented with a list of icon *filenames* instead of the actual graphical icons, as he was in the "Select Icon" dialog. The filenames themselves are usually useless for selecting an icon. Furthermore, there is no obvious way of changing the view mode to a graphical one. For example, clicking on the "Configure" button allows the user to select only between "Short View" and "Detailed View". What he really wants is "Thumbnail previews", which is accessed through the context menu. There are two possible solutions here: 1. Allow the user to select directories, not just files, to be opened. If the user selects a directory, a preview of all icons available should appear in the "Select Icon" dialog. 2. In the "Open" dialog, enable "Thumbnail previews" by default, or at least make it more obvious how to enable it.
On further thought, implementing both solutions would probably be the best from the user's point of view, as he is then given the choice which browsing interface he prefers. Furthermore, the "Select Icon" dialog has the advantage that users can also instantly search by filename using the Search box, whereas the "Open" dialog has only a filename filter.
This problem seems to be even worse in KDE 4.1.0: there does not appear to be any way at all of changing a file type's icon!
Moving from "kio/kfile" component to "kfile" product, helps sorting out duplicates.
Works fine in KDE Frameworks 5. The resulting Open dialog that appears can be configured to show huge icons, if that's what you want.