Toot

Written by David Chisnall (Now with 50% more sarcasm!) on 2025-01-28 at 13:59

@john_philip_bell @0xabad1dea This is one of the mistakes the Wayland folks made (I think it might be fixed in later versions?): they made drag and drop behave like copy and paste. With the latter, there's a potentially long time between the copy and the paste and the source can go away in the middle. This removes the opportunity for content negotiation and means copy can be a fairly high-latency operation because you need to provide all possible useful encodings.

With drag and drop, you want the drag to start immediately, but then at drop time you have a live channel between sender and receiver, so can do content negotiation and encode only the desired format. Latency at drop time is much more acceptable to users than latency at drag time.

DDE was more exciting because it created a live channel between sender and receiver and so both were able to edit the same underlying object. Few things used it well.

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