On Wed, 20 Jun 2012 17:00:40 -0700 (PDT)
Darrell Anderson <humanreadable@...> wrote:

> I think the Ark extraction dialog is broken.
> 
> Ark refuses to retain a kdialog size. The dialog always opens too small for me to read the file text box. I have to manually resize every time. Rinse, repeat. Frustrating.
>
> Ark does not use a full kdialog. There is no toolbar, hence, no button with my bookmarks.
> 
> Ark won't retain a dialog history. I have two working directories to which I routinely want to extract files. I want those locations retained in the drop-down history. Each time I open Ark the dialog defaults to $HOME/{$ARCHIVE_NAME} with no history.
> 
> Sometimes Ark will default to extracting to $HOME/{$PREVIOUS_ARCHIVE_NAME}//{$ARCHIVE_NAME}, which to silly. (Also notice the double slash.)
> 
> Just to be sure, I created a fresh profile and noticed the same behavior.

All of these behaviours exist for me in KDE3 (I seem to vaguely remember that
the double-slash only pops up when it would need to create the directory).  I'm lucky
in that the one dialog is large enough for me to be able to read most filenames.

> I can somewhat cheat by manually editing arkrc with the following:
> 
> [generic]
> extractionHistory[$e]=/some/directory1,/some/directory2

Never tried that--thanks for the tip.

> I don't know why Ark doesn't automatically create that config key.
> 
> I seem to recall this working at one time in 3.5.10, but I can't get this to work there any more either.

Maybe it was 3.5.0-3.5.9?  Or even 3.4.??
 
> This is classic paper cut territory and I'm bleeding. :-)

You're not the only one.  I can't even count the number of occasions on which this
behaviour has driven me up a wall and down the other side. ;P