Terminal/Emacs Driven Drag and Drop

File Managers, and many web/desktop applications—such as WhatsApp, DropBox, GDrive etc.—have a drag and drop feature: You click on some UI element, say a folder/file and drag it to a dedicated spot in the app. For terminal users, this can be an annoying feature, particularly if you hate using UIs. To work around that, enter: dragon; a lightweight drag-and-drop source for X. Using dragon you can easily run it against any file from your terminal, and it will pop up a window with just that file in. From this window, you can drag your file to a target. This is as simple as:

dragon myfile

Note that the above command will not close the window once it completes. To close the window once you are done:

dragon myfile --and-exit

Personally, I use “dired-dragon”, an emacs wrapper around this tool. My configs are:

(use-package dired-dragon
  :straight (:host github
             :repo "jeetelongname/dired-dragon")
  :after dired

  ;; if you use use-package for bindings
  :bind (:map dired-mode-map
         ("C-d d" . dired-dragon)
         ("C-d s" . dired-dragon-stay)
         ("C-d i" . dired-dragon-individual)))

dragon is a useful tool that doesn’t get in my way. I’d strongly recommend it; if not for it’s utility, then for it’s novelty and simplicity.