elementary / elementary/files

Column view: Soft open folders on single click

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#1,908 2 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub
Needs Design Priority: Wishlist
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Vala
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Description

### Problem

I regularly stumble upon the following behavior:

1. Click a folder
2. Press `F2` to rename that folder

This does not work because the folder is already opened and the selection has moved to its contents, thus the selection of the initial clicked folder is lost. This issue of course is the same for copy/paste or any other command executed with a keyboard shortcut. I really like the behavior of single click to open folders and double click to open files, so please hear me out 😅

### Proposal

My proposal to solve this issue would be:
Open the folder — meaning show its contents in the next column, but keep the selection active on the clicked folder. This way every operation executed by using the keyboard would work and the folder is "openend" at the same time.

This would conflict with keyboard navigation and could maybe be solved this way:
- **Current:** Click folder, use arrow up/down to navigate folder contents
- **Proposal:**: Click folder, press arrow right to move focus to folder contents, use arrow up/down to navigate folder contents. This, I guess, would actually be consistent with how the navigation currently works if the keyboard is used exclusively

There might be more conflicts, although currently I can't think of anything else.

### Prior Art (Optional)

_No response_

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