Dolphin Hovercards Plugin

A KDE Dolphin plugin (C++/KF6) that injects rich hovercards in the main file view and supported places entries.

Features

Main file view

• Files and folders in Dolphin's main view (not just the sidebar)
• Large preview image when available (images, PDFs with white background compositing)
• Theme icon fallback when no preview exists
• Folder details: item count, path, timestamps
• File details: size, mime type, path, timestamps

Media metadata

• Images: dimensions
• Videos: dimensions, length, bitrate
• Audio: length, channels, bitrate
• Role-based metadata reading from Dolphin/KIO model first, with ffprobe fallback when available

Places / devices

• Hovercards for actual device entries in Places (physical/mountable devices)
• KDE Connect entries (kdeconnect://) are supported
• Device cards include mount point, filesystem/device info and usage where available

Integration behavior

• Hooks both view + viewport and maps proxy indexes to source indexes
• Includes Dolphin-specific fallback path for item info when default tooltip flow is intercepted
• Strings are localized via KDE i18n (i18n*)

Build

cmake -S . -B build -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release
cmake --build build -j

Optional dependency

• ffprobe (from ffmpeg) is optional but recommended for richer audio/video metadata fallback.

Install

Global (recommended)

sudo cmake --install build --prefix /usr

This installs the plugin to /usr/lib/qt6/plugins/kf6/overlayicon/dolphinhovercards.so.

User-local

cmake --install build --prefix ~/.local

This installs the plugin into ~/.local/lib/qt6/plugins/kf6/overlayicon/, which Dolphin loads for overlay plugins.

Then restart Dolphin:

kquitapp6 dolphin; dolphin &

If hovercards don't show

If your desktop session does not include ~/.local/lib/qt6/plugins in Qt plugin paths, launch Dolphin with:

QT_PLUGIN_PATH="$HOME/.local/lib/qt6/plugins:/usr/lib/qt6/plugins" dolphin

For a permanent fix, add QT_PLUGIN_PATH via Plasma/session environment and log out + log in once.

Quick verification

QT_DEBUG_PLUGINS=1 dolphin --new-window 2>&1 | grep -i dolphinhovercards

You should see Dolphin discovering/loading dolphinhovercards.so.

Source layout

• src/ core plugin flow (Plugin.cpp, EventFilter.cpp, ViewHooks.cpp, ModelUtils.cpp, ...)
• src/lib/ hovercard rendering/preview helper code
• src/utils/ metadata + drive utility helpers

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License. See LICENSE for details.

Contributing

Contributions are welcome! Please open issues for bugs or feature requests, and submit pull requests for improvements.

Screenshots

Hovercards for drives:

Hovercards for files:

PDF preview with white background compositing (note the white background in the preview, which is a workaround for Dolphin's default transparent background that can cause visibility issues):