drag and dropwindow-manager
Do any any minimal WMs, like scrotwm or xmonad (OR any others), support drag and drop between windows out of the box? If so which? If not, is there a way to enable such functionality?
A classic example would be to have a file manager in one window, from which you drag a file into an open application in another window to open it, etc. etc.
The symptoms arise from two distinct issues here:
The compositor: use something more recent like Compton in this case, with the following last options if supported by your hardware:
exec --no-startup-id compton -cCGb --backend glx --vsync opengl
The fact that compositors are not officially supported by this window manager and because of the way i3 renders window title bars. A well-known workaround is to disable such title bars by adding to ~/.i3/config:
new_window pixel
To move around a floating window with no titlebar, use mod+drag anywhere on it. Finally, some of this may change over time.
I had exactly the same problem a few months back and ultimately just wrote a tool to do it for me. When I saw this and found someone else had the same itch I cleaned it up so that someone other than me could actually get it running, and finished off my to-do list. The code is up now: https://github.com/mwh/dragon
To get it, run
git clone https://github.com/mwh/dragon.git
cd dragon
make
That will give you a standalone dragon executable - you can move it wherever you want. make install will put it in $HOME/.local/bin.
Either way, you can then:
dragon *.jpg
to get a simple window with draggable buttons for each of those files:
You can drag any of those into a browser, a file manager, an editor, or anywhere else that speaks the standard drag-and-drop protocol.
If you want to go the other way, and drag things in to it, use --target — they'll be printed to standard output, or available to drag out again with if you use --keep as well.
To build you'll need a C compiler and the GTK+ 3 development headers - if you're on Arch you'll get those just by installing GTK+, but on other distributions you may have to apt-get install build-essentials libgtk3-dev or yum install gtk3-devel or similar first. Other than that it's entirely self-contained, with no constituent libraries or anything, and you can just put the executable where you want.
My use case is mostly one-off drags of only a few files (usually just one), without particularly caring how they show up, so if that doesn't line up with what you want then Dragbox (which I didn't see until recently) might still be better for you. Just yesterday I added the support for using it as a drag target as well, so that part hasn't had much use on my end. Other than that, though, I've been using this successfully for a while now. There are other modes and options described in the readme file.
Best Answer
In X11, drag and drop is something that the application must support, it has nothing to do with the window manager. For example: you cannot drag'n'drop anything in a
xcalcwindow, even with the Compiz window manager.The X11 drag and drop protocol is called XDND: see http://www.newplanetsoftware.com/xdnd/ for more information.