3 ms·

>I have no idea what you mean, but you can drag lots of stuff in windows to different places and stuff happens. On macOS, there's a concept called "Proxy Icons

by sirn 4y ago

>I have no idea what you mean, but you can drag lots of stuff in windows to different places and stuff happens. On macOS, there's a concept called "Proxy Icons". These are little icons that are shown in a title bar of a document-based applications (e.g. "[ICON] My File.txt"). You can interact with these icons as if they are an actual file on the disk. For example, you have "My File.txt" open in TextEdit, and you want to reference them in Terminal, you can just drag the icon into Terminal.app window and it will resolve the full path. Or you're editing the file, but realized you need to make a copy of that file before making changes, you can alt-drag on the icon and copy it elsewhere. Or you're working on a file and want to navigate to the containing directory, you can right click on the proxy icon and it will show the full hierarchy for navigation, etc. This is something I missed quite a lot when using other OSes.

jemmyw 4y ago
And yet they redesigned preview and hid the damn icon. You can still get the drag thing sometimes, but every time I struggle to find what to drag... is it the title text or just next to it? Sometimes it doesn't work with anything, did I forget where to drag from or does it not work from this file? Who knows, it's very frustrating.
- andrekandre 4y ago
  and to think, they caused all this problems just to make mac app window titles look more similar to ipad apps...
- sirn 4y ago
  It was very frustrating when they hide the proxy icon behind an obscure modifier key trigger and a delay in Monterey. Thankfully enough complains were made, and they've since added a toggle in Monterey 12.1 to always show proxy icon (Accessibility -> Display -> [ ] Show window title icons).
  - luckman212 4y ago
    Terminal equivalent: defaults write com.apple.universalaccess showWindowTitlebarIcons -bool TRUE
tyfon 4y ago
Things like this actually works in KDE, I can take a file from the file manager and drop it into konsole and it will copy the path. It's how copy/paste intents are supposed to work, the receiving object or program might want to use the object sent in various ways so you can extract image data or path if it's an image for instance. Konsole just grabs the path from all that is sent to it that is not clear text. I did try your text file example from kate (text editor), but that didn't work. otoh, kate does provide the path to the file for easy copying right below this icon :) I can drag the file from kate, however konsole doesn't accept the object. I suspect kate doesn't encode the path in the copy/paste object, perhaps something I should fix.
AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
Sounds a lot like drag and drop saving, which as I recall was a feature first introduced in RiscOS. That UI was way ahead of its time.
yamtaddle 4y ago
Drag n drop being something you can actually use and that usually does the thing you'd expect, rather than something you train yourself never to do outside things like moving files around in Explorer or whatever, because it usually breaks things, is one of the things that makes it hard to switch away from macOS once you're used to it. Last time I tried KDE a couple years ago I crashed an app in the first five minutes by trying to drag n drop, and was like "oh yeah, that's why I didn't used to ever try to drag and drop things".
somat 4y ago
One of the nicer ui elements on sgi's was the drop pocket. a specific identifiable spot where dropping a item would do something, it is a ui feature I wish had been picked up by other toolkits. The other really nice part about the sgi file explorer were the little buttons above the address bar to quickly go to a specific part of the hierarchy. Windows got this in 7(10 years later) and it works well but is via a hidden state. I am less familiar with mac's finder but I think it can do it, again via hidden state. https://software.majix.org/irix/screenshots/screen.5.big.jpg https://software.majix.org/irix/screenshots/screen.5.big.jpg here you can see a drop pocket(the blue folder icon to the left of the address bar) that takes paths. and the very nice irix address bar.

by sirn 4y ago

jemmyw 4y ago

And yet they redesigned preview and hid the damn icon. You can still get the drag thing sometimes, but every time I struggle to find what to drag... is it the title text or just next to it? Sometimes it doesn't work with anything, did I forget where to drag from or does it not work from this file? Who knows, it's very frustrating.

andrekandre 4y ago
and to think, they caused all this problems just to make mac app window titles look more similar to ipad apps...
sirn 4y ago
It was very frustrating when they hide the proxy icon behind an obscure modifier key trigger and a delay in Monterey. Thankfully enough complains were made, and they've since added a toggle in Monterey 12.1 to always show proxy icon (Accessibility -> Display -> [ ] Show window title icons).
- luckman212 4y ago
  Terminal equivalent: defaults write com.apple.universalaccess showWindowTitlebarIcons -bool TRUE

tyfon 4y ago

Things like this actually works in KDE, I can take a file from the file manager and drop it into konsole and it will copy the path. It's how copy/paste intents are supposed to work, the receiving object or program might want to use the object sent in various ways so you can extract image data or path if it's an image for instance. Konsole just grabs the path from all that is sent to it that is not clear text. I did try your text file example from kate (text editor), but that didn't work. otoh, kate does provide the path to the file for easy copying right below this icon :) I can drag the file from kate, however konsole doesn't accept the object. I suspect kate doesn't encode the path in the copy/paste object, perhaps something I should fix.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago

Sounds a lot like drag and drop saving, which as I recall was a feature first introduced in RiscOS. That UI was way ahead of its time.

yamtaddle 4y ago

Drag n drop being something you can actually use and that usually does the thing you'd expect, rather than something you train yourself never to do outside things like moving files around in Explorer or whatever, because it usually breaks things, is one of the things that makes it hard to switch away from macOS once you're used to it. Last time I tried KDE a couple years ago I crashed an app in the first five minutes by trying to drag n drop, and was like "oh yeah, that's why I didn't used to ever try to drag and drop things".

somat 4y ago

One of the nicer ui elements on sgi's was the drop pocket. a specific identifiable spot where dropping a item would do something, it is a ui feature I wish had been picked up by other toolkits. The other really nice part about the sgi file explorer were the little buttons above the address bar to quickly go to a specific part of the hierarchy. Windows got this in 7(10 years later) and it works well but is via a hidden state. I am less familiar with mac's finder but I think it can do it, again via hidden state. https://software.majix.org/irix/screenshots/screen.5.big.jpg https://software.majix.org/irix/screenshots/screen.5.big.jpg here you can see a drop pocket(the blue folder icon to the left of the address bar) that takes paths. and the very nice irix address bar.