Created attachment 118241 [details]
Current view settings window

In Dolphin when you're in a folder and change any of its view settings, Dolphin will create a .directory file in the folder to remember these settings that are unique to the current folder.

This gets annoying quickly:

1. It makes it hard to delete empty folders automatically, you can no longer just run a simple commands like "rmdir *" and "find -type d -empty -delete" etc.
2. It makes the process manually deleting empty folders more cumbersome.  I can't just view the recursive folder properties to check it says 0 files then delete it.  It's a time consuming process of turning on 'show hidden files' and manually checking that there's only .directory files in all the sub-folders of the tree.
3. They get in the way in other places, such as needing to add .directory to .gitignore and lots of other things like that, which often get forgotten, and some software makes it hard to ignore files.
4. It messes with the folder's modified timestamp - I can no longer look at the folder timestamp to actually see when an actual meaningful data change to the contents was made.
5. Just more general junk being distributed to remote systems like desktop.ini / .DS_Store /._* files that we see littered through projects and servers etc that is irrelevant to everyone except for the one-and-only person that the files passed through where the junk got added.

I know I can just disable custom view settings altogether with "Use common properties for all folders", but I still want to be able to set + remember custom view settings on my local folders.

It would be great if there were an option to leave the target directory itself untouched, and instead just store this data somewhere under ~/.cache/dolphin or ~/.config/dolphin or somewhere like that.

Yes - of course this means that if you rename/move the folder, the settings are lost.  But it's not anything important being lost, for me that's much more preferable to the current .directory littering everywhere, or disabling custom views entirely.

Alternatively maybe these settings could be stored in extended filesystem attributes (I guess that won't work on NTFS etc though?).  In this case it could just fall back to .directory or not remembering settings on those filesystems.

I'm not saying that the .directory files should be abandoned completely, or that we should change the default behaviour ... just an option would be nice so that we can pick between .directory -or- ~/.cache/dolphin

See the attached screenshot of: Dolphin > Settings > Configure Dolphin > General tab > Behavior tab > View ...

It currently has the options:

- Remember properties for each folder
- Use common properties for all folders

I propose changing this to something like:

- Remember properties for each folder using .directory files
- Remember properties for each folder using ~/.cache/dolphin
- Use common properties for all folders

...or...

- Remember properties for each folder using .directory files
- Remember properties for each folder using extended filesystem attributes
- Use common properties for all folders