SUMMARY Searching / filtering is important for many users (see https://www.ryananddebi.com/2015/07/13/linux-getting-find-working-in-dolphin-on-kde-linux-mint-and-kubuntu/ still receiving comments after 5 years). While basic (and regex-) filename searching work for me I've got troubles searching for filedates: I've browsed quite a bit but got no clues on how to filter for modification time / modification date or any other (file) date. Even https://docs.kde.org/trunk5/en/applications/dolphin/quick-tips.html#filter-files leaves that out. Yet Bug 431240 indicates a date filter and my dolphin version (18.12.3) also shows such a filter. However it is greyed out completely. Lacking any documentation it's not clear to me why that is so: Searching for a filedate seems quite natural very much like a filename. STEPS TO REPRODUCE 1. start dolphin 2. click on search button 3. expand "more-options" OBSERVED RESULT date is offered but greyed out EXPECTED RESULT date is offered and can be selected SOFTWARE/OS VERSIONS Linux: openSUSE Leap 15.1 KDE Plasma Version: * libKF5Plasma5 5.55.0-lp151.2.3.1 KDE Frameworks Version: * KDE Frameworks 5.55.0 Qt Version: * QT 5.9.7 ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
Created attachment 135093 [details] Screenshot with greyed out date controls
Checking with a recent Dolphin, the options to search/filter on file types, dates, ratings and tags appear when I enable baloo. If I disable baloo, they are greyed out. If I reenable it, they come back. Maybe check that you have baloo running (run 'balooctl status').
Indeed, baloo was disabled. After enabling it, I get mixed results: A local folder did show the options enabled, a remote filesystem did not work. I do not want to index files just to search for file dates, particularly for large remote filesystems that is a no go. Yet I thank you for pointing out baloo, somehow I assumed filename and filedate search would work without baloo and didn't check, sorry.
FWIW Baloo doesn't index remote filesystems, just your local one. So that won't be a problem if you turn it back on. You can also tell it to just index filenames, and not content.
You can turn off the 'full text' indexing with: balooctl config set contentIndexing no and then: balooctl disable balooctl enable to clear and rebuild the index. I think this is OK with 5.55. The commands to purge the database have changed with recent versions
I'll give it a try, thanks. So far the dialog got immediately active on local filesystems but not on a cifs mount. What I don't quite understand from comment 4 (https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=431988#c4): Will searching for file date actually work on remote filesystems, if these aren't indexed by baloo, but baloo is required to search for file date?
... But the discourse digresses somewhat from dolphin towards baloo; my original question on how to use the filters has been answered, thank you. It might be worthwhile to add on documentation / help or some kind of tool tip but it seems to work the way it was intended. I'd preferred to have that search "built in" but it was designed and implemented differently and that's ok, especially as I can use kfind from dolphin and have this kind of search. Thus the ticket can be closed.
I've overlooked bug 396898 before. According to the comments even the tooltip idea seems already implemented... Maybe the suggestion to switch to kfind (bug 391677) could help to avoid these and other unexpected issues (like bug 420172).