Mark Knecht <markkne...@gmail.com> posted 5bdc1c8b0906181839r18d3a8c0yfa9d5da993d66...@mail.gmail.com, excerpted below, on Thu, 18 Jun 2009 18:39:51 -0700:
> This issue seems to come up occasionally. I'll download some zip file to > my desktop and use an archive manager to drag a bunch of stuff out. > Having done that I might delete some audio files but want to keep > others, or I might want to separate them into different folders based on > what I'm going to do with them. I do something a bit different that should work in your case, but I do it for a different reason. (I don't like many things on the desktop at all, if there's more than can be counted on the fingers of one hand, I'm getting uncomfortable. Thus, while I do use the desktop for individual files occasionally, that's /all/ I keep there, individual files. BTW, no "trash" or other such "system" stuff there either. Well, except for...) What I hit upon is this: 1. In my home dir, I have a "dir" subdir. But it could be called "links" or "working" or "inbox", or something else of similar nature. 2. On my desktop I then keep a single symlink, to ~/dir. (It's a symlink because one time when I used to keep "dir" on the desktop itself, one time, I accidentally deleted it... and everything in it! Since the dir is now elsewhere and all that's on the desktop is a symlink, no big deal if I do that again, since all it will have deleted is the symlink, and I can easily recreate /that/. 3. Thus, while the desktop itself stays uncluttered, my "dir" aka "links" or whatever one wishes to call it, dir, is a single-click away. If I want to work with it, I can open it with a single click, but at the same time, I don't have to stare at all those ugly icons on the desktop all the time. (BTW, as has been being discussed in another thread, I run a dual-monitor setup, stacked 1920x1200, for 1920x2400 total. The bottom monitor is my "working" monitor. This is where most of my windows go. When I'm doing mail or news, pan or kmail is maximized across this screen only. When I'm browsing either the web or local files, or when I open a terminal window, their default size is a quarter the bottom monitor, so I can tile four such konsole or browser windows in a 2x2 matrix, and still have 960 px wide terminal and browser windows, which is normally very reasonable. The only thing is those windows, at ~580 px tall, don't give me much vertical reading space, so I have kwin's title-bar double-click action set to maximize (to one monitor) vertically, so I can get a longer view if I want it. Anyway, that leaves the top monitor free for the 300 px tall panel with system monitors, a big clock, etc, across the top, always shown, plus 1920x900 px of auxiliary workspace, on which I can put another auxiliary window or two, perhaps have an mpd client media player going, etc, PLUS still have enough of the desktop still free so I can still access the handful of items I typically have on the desktop, including the "dir" symlink. Thus, that "dir" symlink on the desktop is almost always available for single-click access, no matter /what/ I have spread across the working monitor below, even if I have a couple "extra" windows open up top as well! However, that ALSO means the top monitor desktop remains visible nearly all the time, and I really do NOT like having whatever wallpaper I happen to have loaded at the time spoiled by too many icons, blossoming like big ugly zits on my wallpaper! FWIW, here's a (1/3 scale and reduced to 256-color for the web) now several years old screenshot, dated, but gives you a visual idea of what I'm talking about. Watch the link-wrap! http://members.cox.net/pu61ic.1inux.dunc4n/pix/screenshots/screen.33.256.png I really need to update that... It's from early 2006...) 4. In my "dir" dir, I have other directories (one of which is called "working" but could be just as easily called inbox, the reason I didn't use that name for the one directly on the desktop), symlinks to other frequently visited directories (like my mm partition), and often, whatever I happen to be working on that I've just downloaded or whatever. 5. Thus, as I've said, "dir" is a single-click away on the desktop, so I have instant access to whatever I need therein, and that's where I put stuff most folks would put directly on their desktop, temporarily. The the desktop itself contains little else. ..... That's where this whole thing gets back around to your problem. If you create a similar one or two working dirs (or perhaps better, symlinks to working dirs) on your desktop and don't put anything else on the desktop, you'll still have pretty direct access to them, but they'll open as folders, and you should be able to drag and drop multiple items from them without issue. Meanwhile, your desktop itself will stay much less cluttered, and because there's only a couple items directly on the desktop anyway, you'll never need to worry about whether multi-select and drag works on the desktop or not, regardless of /what/ DE/WM you are running. =:^) -- Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs. "Every nonfree program has a lord, a master -- and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman
