Ah yes, Windows Explorer. One of the oldest parts of Windows, and yet, it's far from perfect. It's hated less than, say, the Finder (but that's no achievement), but most geeks I know aren't particularly fond of it either. For Windows 8, Microsoft is going to make the biggest change ever to Explorer's interface: it's getting the ribbon treatment.
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Member since:2007-09-06
I'll take it. ok.. I'm cheating.. I always right-drag and drop through context menu specifically because I want to copy or move a file not let Windows arbitrarily choose which to do.
In general though:
DnD file to the the same drive = move
DnD file to a different drive = copy
c:\file.ext to c:\dir\file.ext = moved
c:\file.ext to d:\dir\file.ext = copied
The grief for me is actually with file permissions. If you copy a file, it adopts the permissions of the destination folder. If you move a file, it retains the permissions from the source folder.
Where this becomes an issue is users who are not used to being aware of security contexts. A user grabs the file they are working on and moves it to the team's shared folder only to find out the rest of the time still can't access the file. I have to go over; move hte file back, copy it into the shared folder, delete the original, awknowledge users 'why does it work that way?' comment.. return to regular daily tasks.
The solution to both problems is right-drag. You get the context menu to specify copy or move and you usually want to pick "copy" so you get expected file permissions applied and retain a copy of the original until confirming that the file copied clean.
Member since:
2010-06-19
It's not just that, DnD is bad for the less technically literate, also. One slip of the finger and they have to come and call me because that file they wanted to move ended up god-knows-where.
It's also wholly inconsistent. I defy even a power user to predict when DnD will copy a file and when DnD will move a file. The worst example was XP's 'favourites' (explorer sidebar, menu), which would move your stuff to the favourites folder. I ended up being unable to login to an install after I tried to create a shortcut to my explorer shell replacement in favourites, unaware that'd it'd move the whole damn blackbox directory and leave Windows looking for my shell in the wrong place.
Granted, that's an outside use case and my second complaint is mostly over MS' implementation, not DnD itself.