Dolphin Single Click on Xfce

Posted by Paul on June 16, 2021

Even if you're a developer who uses Linux, you may not have heard of Dolphin or XFCE but Dolphin is my favourite File Manager (and has been for a long time) and XFCE is my current favourite Desktop Environment.

Unfortunately, Dolphin really belongs on KDE (also an excellent Desktop Environment) and although it does work fine it can require a few extra steps if you really want to configure it.

In this case, I'm after a Single-Click to open files and run programs because when you spend all day every day working on your computer this setting will almost halve the number of clicks you have to make and crucially reduce the speed of them which will make using the computer a more relaxing experience and probably reduce tension in your mouse arm and improve your life in all sorts of ways!*

(For Window users it should be possible to enable Single-Click file opening in File Explorer.)

To cut a long story short, the XFCE Desktop Environment uses the GTK2 Window Manager and the KDE Desktop Environment uses the Qt5 (pronounced "cute five") Window Manager. That means for Dolphin (a Qt application) to run on XFCE, it needs to run on Qt and Qt has its own config settings for things like Single-Click file opening that aren't acceessible from any of the XFCE settings.

To configure Single-Click then (and change various other Dolphin (and other Qt app) defaults you need to install and run "qt5ct" from the terminal which will then give you the option to enable Single-Click (and change the theme etc.) from the Interface tab:

*Probably.

This solution mostly came from this excellent forum thread.

Did you find this article helpful? If so please let us know in the comments!