Recently, while I was reading an article in the Firefox web browser, I happened to accidentally click on a link and drag it outside the browser. And the result was rather interesting. Gnome obediently created a shortcut to the webpage pointed by the link on the desktop. Seeing this and having piqued my curiosity, I decided to try a few other things and to put it lightly, I was surprised and pleased with the results. These are my findings...
Create a shortcut of a webpage or a link in a website on the Gnome desktop
Click on the web link in the web browser and drag it on to the desktop. Gnome will automatically create the shortcut (link) to the remote location pointed to by the link you just dragged.
Note: It also works if you select the link in the Firefox address bar and drag it to the desktop.
Save a block of text from a webpage to a file
Select the text in the webpage and drag it on to the desktop. Gnome will auto-magically create a text file and save the selected text into it. You will also be prompted to rename the file to a name of your choice.
Fig: Showing the drag'n drop possibilities in GnomeCopy an image from a remote location.
While the image is displayed in the web browser, just click on the image and drag it to the desktop. Gnome will copy the image from the remote location. Take care to drag the image rather than the link pointed to by the image.
Note: These tips are also possible from any application. Not necessarily from the web browser. In fact, I was able to copy a block of text to another file from Gedit. I was able to do this even from evince - the PDF viewer.
These features only prove that Gnome has a very advanced drag and drop functionality built in it.
23 comments:
Thanks for these wonderful tips in Gnome :)
And a nice blog too.
Excellent tips...I had actually tried the dragging the link and creating a shortcut earlier, but had not bothered to experiment beyond that...thanks!
I am glad to see this blog proceeding quite well and providing useful and valuable inputs...many thanks for your efforts to provide assistance to the Linux community...I have also asked our editors to check if they could add this blog in our Linux Research & Future page at eIT.in
Cheers
Ec @ eIT.in
GTK drag&drop is one of the most powerful features, I think.
You can drag quite everything. Have you tried to drag text links on the tabs panel in FF?
You can also drag&drop any file — not just images. Just drag the link, which points on the, for example, TAR.GZ file.
Gnome is smart enough to create a link to a web page when you drag a url onto it, but you can't drag the link it just created back into the browser to open up the page. It saves the link as a .desktop file and FireFox et al have no way of opening it.
Anyone know of any magic to make this work? It boggles the mind that this doesn't "just work".
Looks like there is a $300 bounty available for the person that can fix Drag and Drop between the gnome desktop and Firefox: http://www.gnome.org/bounties/Miscellaneous.html#127553
Enjoyed reading the drag and drop tips in Gnome. Really nice.
@jonathan
I figure, there is constant effort expended to improve the drag and drop functionality in Gnome and the bounty system works obviously as a couple of bounties have already been claimed as listed in the page. The simplicity of Gnome is what attracts me to this desktop the most over other window managers.
I think a good tip related to drag and drop in Gnome: Many time you will accidently drag somthing and your cursor will become a page symbol. You can easily release this action by pressing the 'Escape' key.
Umm I'm not trying to be an ass but you can drag links and images to the desktop with any browser in just about any OS including Windows and Mac. Dragging text to create a file is sort of cool I guess.
I am not trolling or anything, but the same is possilbe in kde - except I can't drag and drop text to desktop, and subsequently have a new file containing that text.
This aint a gnome vs. kde, I was just wondering "hmm.. can kde do that" and i found it can, so i posted it here ;)
Sweet.
"""Gnome is smart enough to create a link to a web page when you drag a url onto it, but you can't drag the link it just created back into the browser to open up the page. It saves the link as a .desktop file and FireFox et al have no way of opening it.
Anyone know of any magic to make this work? It boggles the mind that this doesn't "just work".
"""
It works fine in Epiphany ;-)
Fun stuff thanks for the tip.
I got to playing around with the url-link drag-n-drop stuff using Epiphany. It works like a charm ;)
Maybe not as WOW Cool factor but the menu system in gnome also has drag-n-drop functionality.
Also Right click on an icon in the menu and... Holy sprinting GNOME Batman! Juicy! Take your pick. ;)
I gotta hand it to all the GNOME desktop project maintainers for taking the effort to scale back and establishing a solid foundation to build on. It was the correct approach thanks.
Wow, three things that the Mac OS has been able to do for close to 10 years now. Don't get me wrong, they're all very useful features, and I'm glad to see that Gnome has implemented them.
Thanks. pretty useful
followed the digg link to see ... these (and others similar) have been in Mac OS X since day 1 ... that doesn't mean Gnome didn't pioneer them, I dunno which was first. But in OS X it isn't limited to browser-to-desktop; you can drag'n'drop text or images from almost any application to or from the desktop. Try it in Gnome!
I've been waiting for someone to post an article about this! Thanks a lot (I found you guys through digg)!
Try middle mouse button scrolling in Gnome, a supring amount of things work with that.
In Epiphany you can scroll webpage tags.
In Gedit you can scroll open file tags.
On the panel you can scroll to adjust volume control (on the volume applet).
You can scroll workspaces.
Try some of these out in KDE. If you drag a URL/link to the konsole it will ask if you want to paste the link or "grab" the website (like wget only with kfmclient.) You can also drag a file/folder from konqueror into konsole and konsole will ask if you want to cd/cp/mv or ln to that location.
Dragging a link from the desktop to konqueror automatically opens the website...
Bobby
The only reason why the Mac OS can drag and drop almost anything is because the applications implement drag and drop. If you find a program that's been written badly enough, it will still not let you drag text around even within the same document.
Windows users don't tend to use drag and drop, and many Linux users are former Windows users, so it doesn't surprise me that Linux programs often don't allow d'n'd.
I can't make it work. The "drag text from a site to the desktop and it will automagically become a file you can name," that is. I assume this works only with the very latest Firefox, or that I'm a total idiot.
I see this as yet another reason to move to lynx, Mutt and every other app that allows people to get rid of the rodent. I hate the pest.
Great article However, Gnome drag and drop is causing problems for AJAX websites, When try to drag and drop java script based items with in a web page, nothing happens. Any ideas how to fix it?
Thanks. Any idea on how to develop an application that supports Drag and Drop? Any help will be highly appreciated.
cool!really funny &useful tip!!
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