XYplorer Beta Club

I've asked for this a while back, but it was never addressed, and it's a cool enough feature about Explorer that I wish XY had it...

If you click on a file/folder in an Explorer Window to drag/drop it to some other window, and the Explorer window with the files you are dragging is behind the window you are dragging onto (i.e. the target window has the focus), Windows will keep the Explorer window behind the target window, allowing you to drop the files onto the target window.

To see why this is useful, imagine you have XY maximized (which I always do, except to work around this issue) and you want to drag some files from XY into an email window as an attachment. You currently can't do this because as soon as you click on XY, it jumps in front of the email window which is hovering above it. So you have to unmaximize XY, move it, drag the file onto the email window and maximize again. Not life threatening by any means, but one of this things that Explorer did get right (not many of those things I must admit).

To be honest I'm not quite sure how Windows does this. They must trap the WM_ACTIVATE window message, look for WA_CLICKACTIVE, and return 0. Or perhaps they respond to WM_MOUSEACTIVATE, WM_ACTIVATEAPP, or WM_ACTIVATETOPLEVEL.

Anyways, I would love to have this in XY.

Yes, I know. It's either not possible or I can't do it. There might be some subclassing hack, but I'm not keen to try it. Not until I'm bored enough...

Here's hoping you get bored very soon

diarrhio wrote:

To see why this is useful, imagine you have XY maximized (which I always do, except to work around this issue) and you want to drag some files from XY into an email window as an attachment. You currently can't do this because as soon as you click on XY, it jumps in front of the email window which is hovering above it. So you have to unmaximize XY, move it, drag the file onto the email window and maximize again. Not life threatening by any means, but one of this things that Explorer did get right (not many of those things I must admit).

I don't usually have XY maximised but the problem is one that I recognise and requires windows to be re-positioned. Or so I thought until I found this method which you can use with XY maximised and still drag and drop to hidden windows....

If you select your file in XY to drag say to your email then as you say it gives the focus to XY and hides the email from view below. If you then drag the file onto the email taskbar and hover it gives you back the focus for your email program on top of XY to drop the file. I don't use MS emailing program but it works with other taskbar items.

Ah. That's right. I forgot about that little trick of hovering over the taskbar icon to bring the window you are targeting to the foreground. Thanks! That is a good enough workaround.

admin wrote: ↑17 Oct 2007 09:16 Yes, I know. It's either not possible or I can't do it. There might be some subclassing hack, but I'm not keen to try it. Not until I'm bored enough...

Hi, have you tried to add this feature, or you haven't been bored enough?

Regards

Haha, not yet!

Only for curiosity, would it be very difficult to implement? (change all the way xyplorer drag and drop works... or once known how to do it, it would be relative easy)

Regards

Maybe, cannot even tell that.

Done.