drag and drop behavior

[woody345]

I'm hoping someone can help me with a frustrating problem I am having with drag and drop in Windows Explorer. In the default setup, any files I download end up in "My Downloads" and I would then drag them to various folders such as pictures, videos and so on where they would basically cut and paste on the move. I recently changed the location of the default libraries to another drive and now when I drag and drop, they now just copy the files, requiring an additional delete to clear them from "my downloads". Is there a way to return the cut and paste version of drag and drop rather than having it default as a copy?

 

[logicearth]

Put everything on the same drive. Or get into the habit of right-click and drag. Having a copy operation as default when moving from different drives is a safety precaution.

 

[rsvr85]

Hi woddy & welcome
Hold Shift or CTRL whilst dragging.
Right clicking and dragging also works.

Windows seems to assume which operation is it about to perform, most of the time it is incorrect. This mechanism needs to be improved for sure (hopefully in SP1).

 

[logicearth]

Windows seems to assume which operation is it about to perform, most of the time it is incorrect. This mechanism needs to be improved for sure (hopefully in SP1).

And how would it be improved?

 

[rsvr85]

God knows, we'll leave that to MS' devs shall we!

What i do know is, if that Windows is going to pre-empt an action is should get it right. If not just stick to copy whilst dragging, that way there's no confusion and everyone knows in order to move, you need to press a key and drag or right click shift. The trouble is, is that it's seems inconsistent.

 

[FZ21Z]

When you're moving files about on the same drive it will just move them, when you move them to a new drive it does copy them. I prefer it to do that, as the only reason I move files to my external is to back them up.

 

[logicearth]

God knows, we'll leave that to MS' devs shall we!

Don't mean to go off topic, but if you don't know then how do you know it needs improving? It appears to work just fine.

For example, executables by default have there drag and drop as create a shortcut if dragged from certain locations (Program Files). Files are copy or move. You also get a indicator telling you which move it is going to do. Pretty logical...?

 

[woody345]

Thanks everyone for the quick responses. Seems silly not to have a check box somewhere to give a default action, even more so since it has different operations just if you move from one drive to another.

 

[rsvr85]

The leaning tower of pizas structure need improving, i don't know how to do that either. Does that mean it's structurally sound or should we leave that to the architects?

What abbout logoff times and the taskhost message. That needs improving too but i don't know how, your comment seems a bit redundant to me.

I do know that some different file types trigger different context options, maybe it's just me, but sometimes it seems inconsistent.

 

[logicearth]

Thanks everyone for the quick responses. Seems silly not to have a check box somewhere to give a default action, even more so since it has different operations just if you move from one drive to another.

It has always been copy when drag and drop to a different drive. Been that way for the longest time. Probably even beyond Windows 2000 O.O