How do I make Nautilus windows stick for drag & drop?

Question

When you drag and drop a folder with nautilus, you must carefully set both windows on non overlapping areas of your screen, otherwise selecting one folder will bring the windows to the front, hiding the second one.

On Windows, doing so will stick the explorer.exe windows to the back and let you drag and drop the folder. I suppose it detect a long click to decide whether or not bring the window to the front.

Is that possible with Ubuntu?

Now I know that Nautilus now has split panels by pressing F3, but that not handy. Most of the time, you open a folder, THEN decide to copy. With split panel, you must decide, THEN split the panel and go to the right folder.

Answer 1

While you're dragging hold your mouse over the taskbar icon of the nautilus window, and it'll be raised to the top so you can drop your files in it.

Answer 2

Well, now that Unity is the default desktop in Ubuntu, there is no way to do this anymore, as there is no taskbar. Bugs have been filed to cover this issue (https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=76672 for example), but GNOME developers seems to have decided to just ignore the problem (this bug was reported in... 2002!).

Too bad, no easy drag and drop between Nautilus windows for Ubuntu Natty users...

Answer 3

If you drag down to the taskbar, the window will be raised so you can drop into it. Also, you can right-click on the window bar or the taskbar entry of the window you want to drag to, and select "Always on top".

Answer 4

As mentioned in other answers, you can drag the file to the taskbar and the window will be raised, but that is not the only solution to your problem.

You can also use more generic solution: you can set auto raise window in window manager settings which can be found in system -> preferences -> windows. By setting a timeout forauto-raise, you will only need to move your mouse over certain windows to raise them to top.

This is a rather convenient feature when you combine it with focus follows mouse option. You can easily switch from application to application just by moving your mouse over to the other application.

Of course, this forces you to adjust to a different way of working, but what doesn't?!

Answer 5

I think it is now easier in Unity. Drag and drop on Unity bar (left). It works for multiple windows too. Drag your file on icon - if there are multiple windows then they will be shown with expo view - and drop where you want to.