Deth

I’ve used the filter in Dolphin more times than I can count for various things. IT’s such a no brainer for file management. It’s easy enough to bring it up too just by Ctil+I. My fat fingers hit it often by accident because of the way my keyboard shelf is setup.

Today I discovered purely accidentally that Dolphin file manager that runs on KDE can filter with regex. I use Dolphin if I would like to work with files visually. Today, I wanted to make sure that a file didn’t begin with a question mark.

That’s a well known wild card, but stands for one character. I know that, and just had a brain fart when I typed that into the filter box and the folder with a one character name was the only one showing. I should have know that was what would happen. I’m pretty sure I’ve used it before.

That got me to thinking, I wondered if it would filter by regex. Sure enough, at least the basic regex that I tested out worked!

All of my post markdown files begin with YYYY-MM-DD to make it easier to keep track of when I wrote them. I have 16 years worth of posts written with 1300 and some files in the folder. I decided to see if I could filter by posts just from 2000 and 2001. 20[01]* Did just that for me.

I may have discovered this in the past and forgotten it, but I am putting it here now and writing to hopefully remember it. There have been times when this could have been useful. I love when I discover something out of the blue like this.