When I open a "Save" dialog, or a file selection dialog, only one type of file is shown. Sometimes it even filters by the extensions.
I don't want this! This isn't Windows, where file extensions really matter! How do I disable the filtering, or set it to show "All Files" by default?
The "Save Page" dialog: you'd think there are only 2 files here, both .html files
Nope! There's lots of stuff!
You're going to have to find the line in the Librewolf source code where it sets a file extension and/or MIME type filter on the "Save Page" dialog, edit it to remove the filter, recompile, and optionally create a bugzilla issue and patch to try to get your change adopted for everybody instead of just you.
This isn't a KDE thing, BTW; it's a Librewolf (or upstream Firefox) thing. The web browser knows it's trying to save a web page, so the devs programmed it to force the standard, "correct" extension. (You could try to patch it at the KFileDialog level instead of the Librewolf level as described above, but then you'd lose filtering systemwide.)
More realistically, your best bet is to save it with the
.htmlat the end, and then just rename the file to what you actually want afterwards.What would the effects be?
How would I go about this? Would I need to alter the source code and recompile? What would happen when I update the software?
Purpose, misconceptions, and XY-problem-protection that I already typed elsewhere
What I want is to set the default filter to “All Files” for every application that uses the file picker. I don’t want to do it per application. If there’s a setting for the file picker itself, I want to use that.It’s not just the save dialog, I mentioned the file selection dialog (for uploading) in the post. The Librewolf “save page as” is just one singular example, not the entire problem!
“Saving HTML files with their file extension” can still be accomplished if I can see all the files at once. I’m not changing the extension, I just want to see where I’m putting them. There is no reason why viewing all files would prevent me from saving the same file types together.
Oh! In that case, KFileDialog might actually be (roughly) the part you want to patch.
(That was just what I found in a couple of minutes of looking, BTW. I've never programmed anything related to KDE -- not even applications, let alone the library itself -- so do your own research. I'm just going by generic software engineering principles, not anything specific to how KDE works, either technically or administratively.)
Depends on exactly which bits you change. The "save" dialog probably inherits from an abstract dialog or something. If you change the base class everything will be affected; if you change the derived class only the derived class will be affected. The trick is to find the right layer in the hierarchy that changes everything you want while leaving everything else alone.
Yes, you'd have to alter the source and recompile. At that point, you're basically maintaining your own small private fork of the software, so you'd have to merge your changes back in on each update.
Alternatively, you could try to get the KDE project to accept the changes, but I have no idea how receptive they would be.
If you're saying that you'd like to decouple the filter of what file types you can see from the filter of what file types you can save as, that's interesting. It might have merit in terms of user experience, but I suspect it might be a slightly more invasive change to code -- and an even more invasive change to the public-facing API, which developers of applications that use KDE might have something to say about.