Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you
how to make it easier to drag and drop on your Mac.
MacMost is brought to you thanks to a great group of more than 1000 supporters.
Go to MacMost.com/patreon. There you can read more about the Patreon Campaign.
Join us and get exclusive content and course discounts.
Now one of the basic skills you need to know to use your Mac is Drag and Drop. But I often hear
from people that they have trouble with Drag and Drop especially if they are kind of new to using
a trackpad. First I want to note that there are at least two ways to use a trackpad to Drag and Drop.
One is definitely a little more difficult than the other. That's to use a single finger to do it. Now
with just one finger I can click, drag, and drop it here. But that can be a little difficult to do
especially if you hit the edge of the trackpad. Let's say I'm over here, I click down and I drag
and I hit the edge. I can't go any further. If I were to release it would drop it here.
I don't want to drop it there. I want to drop it in the window to the left. For that reason
alone you should use two fingers when dragging and dropping on a trackpad.
So I'm going to use my index finger to move the pointer where I want. In this case over
this icon here. I want to drag this file. Then going to click down with my thumb and with my
index finger pretty much at the same time although the thumb is usually a little ahead. Then use my
index finger to swipe. You can see I can lift my index finger up and put it back down. So with tiny
little swipes, barely moving it on the trackpad, I can go from edge to edge pretty easily. Then
when it is where I want just lift up my thumb and it will drop there.
When using a trackpad it's important to distinguish between two different actions.
One is a tap. The other is a click. Now a click is when you press down with any single finger
and you actually feel the trackpad push back at you. If you're using a much older trackpad it's
actually a physical click. But today's trackpads actually just give you haptic feedback. So it's
artificial click. But you think you've pressed down. That's different than an actual tap
which is just a quick tap on the surface. You're not actually applying any kind of pressure.
So you can very easily tap to select things. But if you want to drag you want
to click down and feel that pressure under your thumb and then release.
Understanding the difference between a tap and a click is important if you're going
to use these next options which are, in System Preferences, to go to Accessibility
and then scroll down to Pointer Control. Then here you'll find Trackpad Options. But before
I bring that up I'm going to click the Help button here to bring up Help for this entire
System Preference panel here. You could see Trackpad Options right here.
Let's go into Trackpad Options so we can see what we're looking at.
So there's Enable Dragging which we're going to turn On. There are three options. The first one is
Without Drag Lock. What this will do, according to this description, is you can double-tap an item.
That's TAP not click. Then drag it without lifting your finger after the second tap. Let's give that
a try. Since I've turned that on I can double-tap this item but the important thing to remember is
the second tap I don't lift up. Another important thing to remember is a double-tap is fairly quick.
If I tap once, twice that is actually not a double-tap. A double-tap is very fast. So
like that and now, since I didn't lift my finger up after the second tap, I'm dragging. I'm doing
it effortlessly with one finger because I never lifted up after the second tap. Now I can drag
it where I want. I still run into the same problem when I get to the edge though. But actually this
mode will allow you to quickly lift your finger up and continue. As long as you're fast when you lift
your finger up the drag will continue. But if you lift up just a little bit too long the drag ends.
So if you look here it says, "when you lift your finger,
the item stops moving. The item can still be dragged for a fraction of a second
(so you can reposition your finger if it's at the edge of the trackpad." So that's what is happening
there. As long as you're quick you can swipe with one finger when you hit the edge of the trackpad.
But now if you switch to With Drag Lock here it behaves a little differently.
With Drag Lock you double tap an item the same way and then drag it without lifting your finger
after the second tap. Dragging continues when you lift your finger. It stops when you tap
the trackpad once. So now that we have set that let's give it a try. I'm going to double-tap very
quickly and not lift up after the second tap. I can drag it around but if I lift my finger up
the drag it still going on. The drag will continue as long as I don't do another tap. Every time I
touch the trackpad I have to move. If I simply touch the trackpad and don't move then it drops.
Now there is a third option here. Three-finger drag. This means you just use three fingers on
the trackpad to drag. It's a very different way. So with that on I'll take three fingers
and I'll drag like that. It makes it pretty easy to use. So if none
of the other methods work for you, three-finger drag may do the trick.
Now I want to show you another trick that could eliminate drag and drop altogether
for you. Because you can move a file from one place to another without drag and drop.
The way to do that is to select the file and then Copy usually with Command C. But let's do Edit,
Copy. That doesn't do anything. It's actually not copying the entire contents of the file
to the Clipboard. It's just copying basically the information that you've selected this item.
Then you go to another location, like this one. Now if you go to Edit, Paste it will create a
copy of that item there. We want to move it. So hold the Option key down and Paste changes to
Move Item Here. The keyboard shortcut is simply Option Command V. If I do that you can see I
was able to move the file from one location to another without using drag and drop at all. So
the general idea is to select the file, Command C to copy, go to another location, Option Command V
to move. Of course that's not going to help if you're inside of an app like Pages or
something and you're moving an object around. This is more for moving files in the Finder.
But in most apps when you can drag something you can also usually use the keyboard to move
it as well. So I'm going to add a shape here, just a circle. You can see I can
certainly drag this around. But if I just want to use the keyboard with it selected I can usually
use the arrow keys to move it one pixel at a time. Almost all apps have the standard keyboard
shortcut that Shift with the arrows will move it about ten pixels at a time. So it's fairly
easy to actually reposition something using the keyboard rather than having to drag and drop.
Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.