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Drag & Drop in Mac OS X

Tuesday, October 2nd, 2007 | Tips

One of the features that makes Mac OS X so user-friendly is the ability to drag & drop. On your Mac you can drag and drop files, icons and selections of text. I did a survey of the common drag & drop functions that make using a Mac a pleasure. Here’s what I came up with.

The Dock
Your Mac is equipped with a cool application launcher called “The Dock.” It’s the area at the bottom of the screen where a bunch of icons sit. Adding and removing icons from the dock is a snap. It’s as easy as dragging and dropping. If you need to add an application icon, grab it and drag it to the dock. Once you release the mouse it attaches to the dock. When you find that you don’t need certain icons on your dock, removing them is as easy as dragging them off the dock and letting go of the mouse. Pooh! They just disappear. Remember that removing the icon from the dock does not delete the program from your computer. Should you do this unintentionally, you can go back to your Applications folder and find the program icon you removed.

Trash
Getting rid of unwanted files is no more involved then dragging them to the Trash bin in the dock. This also works for ejecting CD’s and disk images. If you accidentally move the wrong file to the Trash, not all is lost yet. You can recover the file by clicking on the Trash and dragging it out. However, once you empty the Trash, it’s over. The file is gone and only specialized software can attempt to get it back.

Moving Files
Changing the location of files on your Mac is as easy as placing icons on the dock or moving files into the Trash. Just grab the file you want to move and drag it over the folder you want to place it in. When you let go the file will be copied to the new location and removed from where it was.

Activating a Web Link
Some applications support hyper links so that you can click on a web link in that application and a browser will launched taking you to the site. But say you’re using an application that does not support hyper links, what do you do then? Not to worry. All you need to do is highlight the link and drag it to a browser icon in the dock or an open browser window. And you will be taken to that site. This works with Safari, Mac’s native browser, as well as Camino and Firefox.

Looking-up Words
Mac OS X comes with a built-in dictionary and thesaurus. If you’re not sure what a word means while surfing the web or reading a text document, you’re in good company. Highlight the word and drag it over the Dictionary icon in your dock. If the Dictionary is already open it will display the word’s definition. This trick works only if Dictionary has been already opened. But it’s still a handy feature.

Storing Text Bits
Have you ever wanted to store a quote from an article you were reading online? One method to do this is to open TextEdit or Word and copy and paste the text. However, if you’re using Mac OS X (10.4 or later) you can store a portion of the text without opening another program. All you need to do is highlight the text you want to keep and then drag it to your desktop. The text clipping will be stored in a file on the desktop. By double clicking on the text clipping you will be able to read the contents as well as copy and paste it into another document.

This is definitely not an exhaustive list of what you can do in OS X by dragging and dropping. I hope this gets your appetite wet enough to play around and discover other things you can do using this technique. What other things have you done in Mac OS X by dragging & dropping?

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