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Reduce ‘text drag delay’ in Apple Mail

Rob Griffiths of macOSXHints fame has posted a tip for reducing the delay between selecting text and being able to drag it in Cocoa-based applications like Apple Mail. Normally, you need to select the text, click and wait for a second, then drag it.

It involves a simple Terminal hack. Open Terminal and type (exactly):

defaults write -g NSDragAndDropTextDelay -int 100

This will reduce the delay from the one second default to a tenth of a second in all your Cocoa-based apps (‘-g’ stands for ‘global’).

You will, of course, need to restart them for the change to take effect.

I get caught out by this sometimes in Mail.app, and end up having to select the text I want twice. Not any more!

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, 23rd November, 2005 at 10:20 am and is filed under Apple Mail, Apple Mail Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

3 Responses to “Reduce ‘text drag delay’ in Apple Mail”

  1. Susan Kitchens says:
    December 1st, 2005 at 6:05 am

    Hey! thanks for this. Because of the delay you mention, all this time I’ve thought that Apple got rid of the drag and drop in their native format. This post clued me in to the fact that you gotta work with it a little differently.

  2. 2020 Hindsight » Mac OS X’s drag and drop text: I had no idea says:
    December 1st, 2005 at 6:09 am

    [...] But Tim Gaden’s post— Hawk Wings ?جø¬? Blog Archive ?جø¬? Reduce ‘text drag delay’ in Apple Mail — told me two things: 1) drag n drop IS there, and, 2) I can DO something to make it work like I want it to. I’ve done the first and now, following his advice, will soon do the second. [...]

  3. stewart campbell says:
    January 2nd, 2007 at 10:04 pm

    thank you thank you – i could never work out why sometimes I could drag and drop and sometimes not – this has cleared things up really well… I will try to live with the one second delay for now, to see if that works, but otherwise will implement the hack here. Great tip!

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