The IDE too frequently interprets my mouse gestures as a drag and drop. I therefore want to turn it off.
I don’t use drag and drop. I don’t WANT to use drag and drop. When it happens, I have to dig around with Windows Explorer to find out where the affected folder or files landed. To often, I can’t even tell WHAT was affected. It is incredibly tedious, and as far as I know there is no “undo”.
I’ve looked around the editor preferences with no joy, and I’ve searched the documentation with no luck.
Can someone please tell me how I can turn this “feature” off altogether?
You cannot turn off drag and drop, it is a pretty basic feature that you will find in just about any file manager out there. You could try increasing the double click speed on the OS level, as I assume this is what is often being interpreted as a drag for your use case.
I appreciate your response. I’ll try frobbing the double-click speed, and perhaps the mouse sensitivity.
What seems to occasionally happen is that my fingertip inadvertently hits the scroll wheel while I’m trying to select a file in the left-hand pane. It might also be that my mouse sensitivity is too high, so that the first click moves it while the button is down. The same mistaken gesture happens when I attempt to select a line of text in the “main” pane for a copy/paste operation, and the selected line is moved to an unwanted new location in the file. The only tool in which I use drag-and-drop for file manipulation is Windows Explorer. I’ve never used drag-and-drop for text in thirty years of using text editors. I get that it’s an “industry standard” – in my view, it’s still undesired behavior.
I’d love to know how many developers actually use this “feature”. I’d very much like to be able to turn it off in my editor preferences.
Perhaps. Nevertheless, this problem is specific to my use of Komodo IDE. I use two wide monitors (each 1920x1080), several simultaneous CentOS vm’s running locally, multiple SSH clients (typically 5-10 at any given time) connected to both local and remote vm’s, and the usual assortment of email, skype, web browsers, and various windows apps. I see this symptom only with Komodo IDE. It’s interesting to me that I don’t experience this within Windows Explorer, where I do frequently use drag-and-drop.
My problem is that, at least in this regard, the behavior of Komodo IDE is inconsistent with my needs (hence my request).
FWIW, I’ve slightly decreased the mouse sensitivity. That seems to be the most likely issue – I think the mouse was moving when I depressed button1 for that first click in selecting an object in KomodoIDE.
In any case, I appreciate both your responsiveness and your candor.
To be clear I’m happy to look for UX improvements we can make here, but I cannot see any that make sense. The main issue here appears to be either a OS setting or your mouse, or both. That’s not something we can address in Komodo, aside from disabling the functionality which in my opinion is not an ideal or desirable solution.
Understood. Can you provide a thumbnail guesstimate of the difficulty (as opposed to desirability) of adding an option to the “Editor” or “Smart Editing” pane of the general “Preferences” page? I’m curious about whether you see this as something a UX developer could do in a day or two, something that would take a team a month or two, or something in between.
An option for disabling drag-drop? Honestly the pref part of it would be very simple, only 30 minutes or so. But the actual functionality (actually disabling drag-drop) is a bit more. It could take anywhere from 1 hour to a day or two depending on its implementation. As I did not implement this myself I cannot say this without first researching the relevant code.
My problem is similar, the Komodo IDE editor wants to drag and drop stuff, when I only want to highlight it.
How can I turn OFF drag and drop in the editor?
@nathanr thanks for the response. I thought your previous comments referred to the file manager, where I don’t have any problem, rather than the editor pane.
As for “workarounds” (I’m on OSX) the click speed seems fine with every other application, and I certainly don’t have the same drag and drop (instead of select) behaviour in any other editor.
Anyway, I appreciate the answer and if this is a “fact of life”, then ok. But it is annoying and it would be an improvement to be able to turn drag and drop off in the editor.
