Posts: 1062 from 2003/2/15
From: Central Europe
@ Jeckel
Quote:
In Ambient, the way of handling multi-selection different (inherited from Directory Opus, FileMaster and other traditional file managers). So, drag and drop cannot be handled like on other file managers with no direct multi-selection.
On other file managers you need to use a secondary qualifier to do multi-selection, which is also a pain.
Please see my comment above.
You do not need to use secondary qualifiers with Finder on MacOS or File Explorer on Windows, just to name the two most prominent examples. If you click on the visible parts of a file name, the file managers assume you want to drag a selection of files or the single file you are clicking on. If, however, you click in some "white space" (or alternatively secondary columns like the date one in MacOS) and move the mouse pointer, then the file managers assume that you want to select multiple files instead.
Before this discussion thread I never even consciously thought about it or had to read up on this in a user manual. It is just really easy to figure out on your own and very convenient.
By comparison, the current Ambient implementation that tries to retrofit dragging & dropping on top of how old file managers handled multi-selection of files is - as others mentioned - rather annoying and very much unintuitive. People should not have to use laser focus to be able to complete a simple task such as dragging a file from one window to another without copying additional files because the mouse movement deviated by 3 degrees from the X axis.
Considering all the great features Ambient has, it is quite disappointing that such basic functionality had been botched like this.
