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Idea #2567: Windows aren't raised on drag and drop init

Written by dsargeant the 2 Mar 08 at 20:00. Category: Accessibility. Related project: Nothing/Others. Status: New
Rationale
When I click on something to drag and drop (drag-n-drop) it e.g. in Nautilus, the window gains focus and is raised. If the destination of my drag (e.g. another nautilus window) is above the window it is lowered and obscured. This forces me to arrange my windows before starting a drag and drop so that my destination is still visible when the source window is raised. This could be fixed by windows not being raised until mouse release instead of mouse down. Ideally, though, there would be a special case where if drag and drop is initialized the window isn't raised until release, otherwise it is raised on click.
Tags: drag-drop

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Solution #1: Auto-generated solution of idea #2567
Written by dsargeant the 2 Mar 08 at 20:00.
Ubuntu Brainstorm was updated in January 2009. Since the idea #2567 was submitted before this update, its rationale and solution are not separated. Please vote accordingly, and if you have the necessary rights, please separate the rationale from the solution. Thanks!

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a3_nm wrote on the 2 Mar 08 at 20:12
Support. That's something I noticed when I switched from Windows, where this idea has been implemented. It should be fixed in Nautilus.

To illustrate the problem, try drag-dropping something from a maximised windows to any other window. As soon as you mouse down on the item you want to drag-drop, the other window will get under the first window. If this only happened on mouse up, the drag-drop could be done more easily.

exactopposite wrote on the 3 Mar 08 at 23:04
if u drag tthe item to where the window is that you want to drag to on the panel it will raise that window. so if i'm dragging from window 1 to window 2 for example: click the ite in window 1 and drag it to where u see window2 on the panel. this will raise window 2.

dsargeant wrote on the 4 Mar 08 at 15:47
exactopposite, thanks for the tip. I just tried it and it works. This will definitely alleviate some frustration in the future. I do think that it is slower and less intuitive than if drag and drop didn't raise the window, though. So I still think it would be an improvement to implement it

dsargeant wrote on the 7 Mar 08 at 16:50
See duplicate http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/3490/ for additional comments.

dsargeant wrote on the 8 Mar 08 at 04:39
Found this workaround from http://live.gnome.org/DocumentationProject/TipsAndTricks for any interested:
"dragging from a window not currently active while pressing the AltGr key or the Super key (usually the Windows key) or one of the modifier key told above will not raise the window, leaving the focus on the current window (this workaround to not-raising-windows-when-they-shouldn't-be possibly only exists due to separate bugs)"

Frants wrote on the 15 Apr 08 at 14:57
Gah.. this is really annoying and has been around since 2002, but still it isn't fixed. This is basic file management! Can it really be that hard to implement? :/

dsargeant wrote on the 12 Jun 08 at 04:46
I found this explanation of why this feature isn't yet implemented: http://blogs.gnome.org/metacity/2008/06/11/drag-and-drop/

frederik.nnaji wrote on the 22 Oct 08 at 16:35
yeah, sufficient would be to implement the "not raise window on mouse drag" for totem and nautilus.

these are two are native Gnome Desktop applications, at least these two should work in concert with each other.
i want to drag a file from my standard file manager into my standard music-player's playlist, without thinking back to how well my other OS used to do that for me.

tkoorn wrote on the 27 Nov 08 at 01:10
One thing that would really help is if you could switch windows while dragging. Under windows I usually drag stuf around by grabbing it with the mouse and then alt-tabbing to get to the right window to drop. However on ubuntu you can't use alt-tab while dragging. Adding alt-tab while dragging would make life a lot easier for me.


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