[Home]RightClickDrag

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In Win32, RightClickDrag is your friend.  Are you fed up with the way that dragging a file from one place to another does unpredictable things?  Never able to remember which out of Ctrl and Shift you have to hold down to move (not copy) the file?
RightClickDrag it.  A wonderful little context menu pops up, asking what you want to do.  If you're dragging an archive, or a hard disk, etc, the options are appropriate to what you're moving.  This will often work with things other than files too - for example, links from InternetExplorer, scraps of text from Word, etc.

You can also use CTRL-C / CTRL-X for all my file copy/moving needs.

Expecting left clicks to do the right thing in general in Windows is probably a bad idea.
They're actually sensible.  Well, predictable at least.  Dragging files moves them, unless they are executables only, in which case it creates a shortcut, or if you are moving them to another drive, in which case it copies.  Remember the drive your desktop is on and you're done.  --Vitenka
Well, you can do.  When I was copying all the files from a set of six CDs onto my HD recently, I was happily just left-click-dragging them.  The defaults are /reasonably/ sensible, yes.  But in general, RightClickDrag is a good habit to get into.  It'll let you choose what you actually want, save you a few accidents, very rarely slow you down in any meaningful way, and sometimes point out to you possibilities you hadn't considered. --AC
I go by the pointer icon, and press combinations of SHIFT and CTRL until the right icon appears... --M-A
I used to do that.  But seriously - RightClickDrag is your friend.  Whenever archives are involved, for instance, or dragging a file into a program's window or a program's icon, or chunks of Word document around, or messages from one Outlook folder to another... the context menu options are always whatever's most appropriate for the particular drag you've just done; the default is highlighted in bold so you can see what the behaviour would have been if you'd done a left-click-drag. Seriously, for anyone forced to use Win32, RightClickDrag is a good habit to get into.  I can't make you do so if you don't want to - but I do recommend trying it.  --AC, unusually vehement



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Last edited October 1, 2003 2:11 pm (viewing revision 6, which is the newest) (diff)
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