The number of times I have accidentally screwed something up with drag and drop exceeds the number of times I have found it useful by a factor of at least a hundred.

I would have thought that (in System Settings / Keyboard & Mouse / Mouse / Advanced) setting the "Drag start time" to zero would completely disable it. But it doesn't.

I want it gone (especially in Konsole, if nowhere else).

Drag and Drop is controlled by applications, and cannot be disabled at all, as it would effectively destroy the functionality of many applications, including the KDE Workspace, Plasma.

Please increase the drag start time to help alleviate the issue you are experiencing.

There should be some way to (globally) have KDE say "that doesn't qualify as drag and drop" no matter what I do (that's what I want). Maybe something like "it has to move 1000 pixels." I am sure that would still cause problems for me, but not as many as now.

I absolutely can not notice ANY difference (using konsole, the application I care most about by far) changing the settings. It seems to work the same whether I have 100 ms or 2000 ms selected.

The help says "drag within the time specified in Drag start time," which indicates to me that SMALLER (time) numbers make fewer actions qualify for dragging.

I don't care about "the functionality of many applications" - I care about having the software do what *I* want.

This is important to me, and if someone would kindly point out the source or configuration files that controls the settings (limits), I will change the maximum drag start distance allowed from 20 pixels to 1000 pixels (or maybe even 10000 pixels), and recompile myself, if necessary.

You are a strange person :)
I looked it up for you, the relevant part appears to be in
kdebase/workspace/kcontrol/input/mouse.cpp
Search for dragStartDist (should be near line 260) and modify the call to setRange.

No guarantees though, I don't usually work on that stuff.

onety-three wrote:You are a strange person :)

No disagreement there. :)

onety-three wrote:I looked it up for you, the relevant part appears to be in kdebase/workspace/kcontrol/input/mouse.cpp
Search for dragStartDist (should be near line 260) and modify the call to setRange.

Thank you. It looks fairly straightforward (kudos to the writers for easy to understand code, especially as I am a rather novice programmer).

I have made a patch and updated the ebuild (THE reason I use gentoo is to automate things like this). I will recompile, and expect it to work a lot "better" the next time I log in.

glupie wrote:(THE reason I use gentoo is to automate things like this)

Once you're set up it's almost the same on Arch (minus useflags). No compilation hassle for most other stuff, though ;)
But I know, a completely self-compiled system just feels special. I've enjoyed it myself in the past.

I am not having very good luck with this.

KWrite partially works. Open windows did not take the new setting,
but new instances of it did.

Konsole did not work at all. Again (as I mentioned above), it
seems to completely ignore those settings. Can someone else do a
quick test on this (just see if you can notice any difference
between 100 msec and 2000 msec)? Thanks.

glupie wrote:Can someone else do a quick test on this (just see if you can notice any difference between 100 msec and 2000 msec)? Thanks.

I just tried it, works perfectly here. I'm not sure why you're talking about msec, though - it's a distance, measured in pixels.
Be sure to log out and log in again after changing the setting, that seems to be required.

Sorry I didn't make myself clear (I can think much faster than I can type :) ).

1. Changing the time setting never seemed to do anything in any application (even opening new instances). I just wondered if anyone else noticed or could verify that.

2. I thought those changes should take effect immediately (even in running applications). I could understand some parameters getting set when a program started (so settings only take effect in new instances), but why should I need to completely log out?

I haven't logged out, since that represents a major undertaking for me (lots of things open, including connections to a half-dozen other computers), but I did just try starting a new session, and the new (high) distance setting did work there, so it doesn't seem to take effect right away.

I am still not convinced the time setting does anything at all, but I will test that a bit more.

glupie wrote:I could understand some parameters getting set when a program started (so settings only take effect in new instances), but why should I need to completely log out?

Usually logging out and logging in again is not a problem, so it's a nice way to restart applications. I guess a real restart of the X server is not required in this instance, but then you'll have to find out which processes belong to which parts of KDE and restart those affected manually. Maybe you even need to kill all of them at one point so that shared stuff vanishes. I can't help you with that, sorry.