alt Hacker News> On desktop (using a mouse or trackpad), drag and drop actually works quite well.
Strong disagree here. It is intuitive, it is easy to demonstrate. But it's not really convenient, especially on a trackpad. I have enough mouse agility to play RTS games but not to do a reliable drag-and-drop, especially in a complicated case - across windows, with scroll, etc.
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> But it's not really convenient, especially on a trackpad
From my experience, there's nothing convenient about a trackpad; pretty much ever. About the only thing they do better than a normal mouse is scrolling left/right, and that's only marginally. I bring a mouse with me when I take my laptop somewhere because I hate the trackpad so much.
On macOS, I find “3 finger drag” very convenient to use, and for me it works a lot better than “press and hold”. (https://support.apple.com/en-us/102341) It even allows you to briefly lift your fingers to reposition them on the trackpad without stopping the drag action.
Yes, it can get tricky if you have to scroll a bunch, e.g. moving a file in a big directory into a subfolder, trying to hit that one pixel where it will scroll up, or using two other fingers to attempt to scroll, while holding the drag finger down...(CLI pros, you win this one).
I would like a desktop pick and place that works like drag and drop, you click and then it sticks to the cursor, but you are free to do whatever gestures until you click again.