Wish: Improve drag&drop: raise window on mouseup & drag&drop

[José M. López-Cepero]

Binary package hint: metacity

I suggest having windows raised not on mouse-button-down (as they are now), but in mouse-button-up; making that the default behavior and/or adding an option to turn it on.

Furthermore, I suggest raising windows if the cursor stays over them for a few seconds when in a drag&drop operation.

Rationale:

 - There are two main "click" operations which can be done in a window: click (button down, button up) and drag (button down, move mouse holding button), as in drag&drop operations.

 - If the user clicks in a window, the new behavior would be almost the same as it is now, with no noticeable differences other than the (very small) delay between mouse-down and mouse-up.

 - If the user wants to do a drag&drop operation, the new behavior would allow him to do the drag&drop between _all visible items_ the moment the operation begins, whereas the old behavior does not.

Say you have two partially overlapping Nautilus windows open. In the one in the foreground there is a folder, and in the one in the background there is a file which is not obscured by the foreground window. You want to drag that file to the folder. With the current behavior, clicking and dragging on the file immediately raises the background window, changing the screen distribution (counter-intuitive) and obscuring a significant part of the foreground window (likely including the intended drag&drop target). With the new behavior, you just drag the (visible) file to the (visible) folder and that's it.

Let's say now that the situation is reversed. You want to drag a file from a foreground window to a folder in a background window. The background window is obscured by the foreground window, so the target folder is not visible. With the current behavior the best way to drag&drop is either moving the windows (so the drag&drop is not direct) or using the task bar (rather inconvenient). With the proposed behavior it's just drag the file to the visible part of the background screen - linger for 2 seconds with the button down - the background screens is raised - drag to the (now visible) folder and release the button.

The suggested behavior would make dragging & dropping more convenient and more intuitive, and I have seen it implemented to good use in several other file managers. I have filed the bug against Metacity because I suppose that it's possible to control this policy in the window manager.

Thanks for your time and keep up the good work.

[Roel Huybrechts (rulus)]

Thanks for your report. Your idea might get more attention and have
the possibility of being implemented if you would submit a
specification for this.

You should first check whether it already exists at the Ubuntu specs
page (https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+specs) in Launchpad. If
that is the case, feel free to contact the drafter of that spec about
your comments/suggestions. Otherwise you can start writing a spec
following the steps described in
        https://wiki.ubuntu.com/FeatureSpecifications.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

That's known upstream: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=112308