Drag and drop

One of the attractive features of RISC OS is the use of drag-and-drop. I have been disappointed by the GUIs available for Linux because they do not seem to offer the user much in the way of letting user-applications respond to graphical user-actions. This is presumably because GUIs in Linux are afterthoughts, not a fundamental part of the OS. Where in RISC OS you can have an application respond to Wimp messages, I presume that with Linux your application has to be linked to libraries that are part of the GUI. For example, does anyone know of a Linux text-editor that can do what the humble !Edit does when you SHIFT-drag a filer object into a text window? Drag-and-drop is used for moving and copying files in most Linux file-managers that I have seen, but do there exist applications that can pass on the drag-and-drop data to other user applications, for use in IO-operations, for example?

I believe that the use of drag and drop actions in other systems were sort of “added on after” and “in specific circumstances” than being a part of the original system design.
RISC OS, when it was released, not only came with a mouse but had a UI that depended upon the mouse. Windows 3.x could be completely used without a mouse. Sure, it had some things harder, but it wasn’t impossible. So I think the paradigm was more for using the mouse to move windows and click stuff, with drag operations more restricted to specific behaviours like shifting files around. Also of note is that whether a file is moved or copied (in XP, don’t know about others) depends upon where the target is – files on the same media will be moved; leading to a habit of right-drag to have a choice pop up. At least RISC OS is filesystem agnostic, the same operation and the same modifier keys always perform the same action regardless of where the target is.

does anyone know of a Linux text-editor that can do what the humble !Edit does when you SHIFT-drag a filer object into a text window

For those who don’t know, that inserts the path/name of the dragged file rather than its contents.

Hate to break it to you, Gavin, but that’s not Edit exactly. It is the text editor handling part of RISC_OSLib. …Sources.Lib.RISC_OSLib.rlib.c.txtedit, function txtedit_obeyeventcode, looks like it passes actions to be handled by stuffing special key codes into the handler? Maybe I misread that. Anyway, it’s there at the point of inserting the file that it determines whether to insert the filename or the file contents:

    filetype = xferrecv_checkinsert(&filename);
    if (filetype != -1) {
      if (akbd_pollsh()) {
        /* Shift held down, insert the filename instead */
        txt_insertstring(s->t, filename);
        txt_movedot(s->t, strlen(filename));
        txt_insertstring(s->t, "\n"); /* add a \n too */
        txt_movedot(s->t, 1);
      } else {
        int size = txt_size(s->t);

        /* No shift, xferrecv the file contents */
        txtedit_doinsertfile(s, filename, xferrecv_file_is_safe());
        xferrecv_insertfileok();
        txt_movedot(s->t, txt_size(t) - size); /* move past insertion */
      };
    }

Of course, you could argue that it is still Edit, given as how most of Edit is in the library rather than the application…

whether a file is moved or copied (in XP, don’t know about others) depends upon where the target is

That’s true of macOS as well. I’m far more likely to copy-and-paste on macOS so as to avoid the file getting moved rather than copied. There’s one exception: I always drag-and-drop to a USB stick as it’s much faster than copy-and-paste when multiple files are involved (e.g. 30 minutes instead of 50 minutes to copy files totalling 7GB).