With the type and select feature implemented in the Folder View Plasma applet, I hope that we finally resolve bug 187241 completely. This makes the applet even more usable than before.
This fix was different in a way that I had my first ever usability discussion with the KDE Usability team over the type and select behavior differing from Dolphin (and in general with anything derived from QAbstractItemView). Finally we concluded that the behavior be modified to match Dolphin's, and thats what the current state is.
The fix will ship with KDE SC 4.5
Reviewboard link http://reviewboard.kde.org/r/2659/
Bug Report https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=187241