Drag/drop copying rather irritatingly ties up the 'from' window until the copy operation is complete currently. This occurs both with folder-to-folder (within the same partition) copying, and with partition-to-partition copying operations.

Would it be possible to do the equivalent of prepending 'wbrun', thus preventing the copy operation from freezing up the window to other inputs? I suppose I could drag & drop the names into a cli window (or type them in - uggghh!), but I'm pretty lazy (er, efficient) when it comes down to it.

Alternatively, is it possible to alter the default drag & drop copy operation to a custom setting? I realise that it is possible to alter the default operation from 'copy' to 'move' using the preferences (Settings>Ambient>Miscellaneous), but this doesn't allow for any custom setting as far as I can see.

It's been a while since I really did any large copy operations on anything but MorphOS (or the goddamn PS3), but I thought that this issue was solved by AsyncWB way back in OS3.x days.

Thanks

[ Edited by boot_wb on 2010/8/7 21:15 ]

First, ambient is asynchronous. It's not because the source view is set to sleep it's synchronous.

It just has this convervative behaviour to prevent from messing up with the source data (for instance deleting selection) while it's being copied.

Anyway, you have two choices there to change that:
- use copy/paste, it doesn't set source view to sleep
- edit sys:prefs/ambient/advanced.conf and use "donotputrefwindowtosleep = true"

Regarding move/copy, the behaviour is inverted if you maintain ALT pressed during (or before?) drag'n'drop.

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I knew I'd read somewhere that MorphOS was fully asynchronous, which is why this behaviour surprised me.

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Understood, although I would say it detracts from the user experience slightly - I've been trying out a few newbies on my MorphOS setup, and this is one of the things they found frustrating (and doesn't prevent a determined fool from deleting files anyay, since one can still navigate to the same location using another window).

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Excellent!
[/Mr_Burns_voice]

The second option does exactly what I wanted to do.
Many thanks Fab - great support as always.