Selecting Items in the View

There are several ways to select items in the view. Once a group of items is selected, all actions, such as Cut, Copy, Move to Trash, and drag and drop operations, affect all selected items.

Selecting Items Using the Mouse

  • You can press the left mouse button somewhere in the view and draw a rectangle around a group of items before releasing the button. This will select all items in the rectangle and clear the previous selection. If the Shift key is pressed during the selection process, the previous selection is kept.

  • If the Ctrl key is pressed while an item is clicked with the left mouse button, the selection state of this item is toggled. If the Ctrl key is pressed while a rectangle is drawn around a group of items as described above, the selection state of all items in the rectangle will be toggled.

  • If the Shift key is pressed while an item is clicked with the left mouse button, all items between the previous current item and the clicked item will be selected.

  • If Show selection marker is enabled in the Behavior tab of the File ManagementGeneral section of the settings, a small + or - button appears in the top left corner of the item which is currently hovered over with the mouse. Clicking this sign selects or deselects the item, respectively.

Selecting Items Using the Keyboard

  • If an arrow key, PgUp, PgDn, Home, or End is pressed, the new current item is selected, and the previous selection is cleared.

  • If the Ctrl key is held while one of the above keys is pressed, the selection remains unchanged.

  • If the Shift key is held while one of the above keys is pressed, all items between the previous current item and the new current item will be selected.

  • If Ctrl+Space is pressed, the selection state of the current item is toggled.

  • Ctrl+A selects all items in the view.

  • Ctrl+Shift+A toggles the selection state of all items in the view.

  • Select a file or folder by typing the first few letters of its name and the first matching item is selected. To clear the selection and cancel the keyboard search press Esc or wait longer than the timeout of 1 second.

Selecting Items Using the Menu

You sometimes want to delete, copy or move a number of files that are similar in some way. For example you may wish to move all of the .png graphics files from one folder to another. Konqueror makes this easy by letting you select multiple files based on similarities in their file names.

Use the Menubar EditSelectionSelect Matching Items... option or the shortcut Ctrl+S. This brings up a little dialog box in which you enter a filename containing the wildcard characters *, which matches any number of characters, and ? which matches a single character. Press OK and Konqueror will highlight all files with matching names. For example:

  • flag*.png will select all filenames starting with the letters flag and ending with .png.

  • memo?.txt will select memo1.txt and memo9.txt but not memo99.txt.

When you have selected a range of files, you can narrow down the selection by using the Menubar EditSelectionUnselect Matching Items... option to specify which of the selected files should be removed from the selection.

Use the Menubar EditSelectionUnselect All option or just left mouse button click on a clear area of the view to cancel the selection.

You can even invert the selection: that is, deselect all selected files and select those that were previously unselected. Use the Menubar EditSelectionInvert Selection option or Ctrl+Shift+A to do this.