Drag and drop
What each kind of drag does, when a file actually moves on disk, and the safeguards around that.
Dragging is where a desktop organizer can most easily do something you did not intend, so this page is precise about which drags touch the file system and which do not.
The four drags#
| Drag | Touches disk? |
|---|---|
| Icon → another board | No. Updates Board membership only |
| Icon → elsewhere in the same board | No. Sets its manual position |
| Icon → a folder shown on a board | Yes. Moves the file into that folder |
| Icon → an Explorer window or another app | Yes. Copies or moves, as Explorer would |
Only the last two change anything on disk, and both are gestures that do the same thing on the real desktop.
Dropping onto a folder#
This is the one gesture that relocates a file from inside DeskDrawer. It has three safeguards:
- The folder highlights while you drag over it, so you can always tell whether you are about to reorder icons or drop a file inside something. Added in 1.1.4 after the ambiguity proved real.
- Across drives it copies, matching Explorer, so nothing is silently removed from a USB stick or a network share.
- The icon leaves its board only after the move has actually completed. A cancelled or failed move leaves the icon where it was. This one took two attempts to get right — a cancelled move onto a local junction still dropped the membership until 1.2.5.
Folder shortcuts work as targets too, not only real folders — that arrived in 1.1.6.
Dragging out to Explorer#
Drag icons off a board into a File Explorer window, or any application that accepts files, and the real files are transferred with normal Windows semantics.
Dragging between boards and back out again does not trigger Explorer's "interrupted operation" dialog; that class of problem was fixed in 1.0.4 by treating a drag that returns to its origin as a no-op rather than a cancelled transfer.
Dragging in from Explorer#
Files dropped onto a board are placed on the desktop and assigned to that board. They land as files on your desktop, exactly as if you had dropped them on the desktop itself.
If a drag seems to hang#
Almost always a Shortcut pointing at an offline network location. Resolving such a target can make Windows wait for a network timeout. DeskDrawer does that work off the interface thread, but the target itself can still be slow to answer. See Troubleshooting and The same bug, five times: offline network locations.