Faster text dragging in Cocoa apps (like Mail)
By default Cocoa apps handle dragging and dropping text in an annoying way. You have to click and hold selected text for a bit before you can drag it. You can’t remove this annoyance, but a Terminal hack can reduce the frustration.
John Gruber drew attention to this over the weekend at the C4 Developers Conference 
in his presentation on “Consistency vs. Uniformity in UI Design”.
Carbon apps (AppleWorks, Microsoft Office, TextWrangler, etc) require no delay. Select. Drag. No Problems.
Cocoa apps (Mail.app, Safari, Mellel , etc) require that you hold your mouse down over the selected text for a moment before dragging.
You can reduce the built-in delay with a simple Terminal hack. Open Terminal and type (exactly):
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 the apps for the change to take effect.
In the past, I often got caught out by this in Mail.app, and ended up having to select the text I wanted twice. Not any more!
[Problem via TUAW , solution via Rob Griffiths at macOSXHints]
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October 22nd, 2006 at 11:07 pm
The logic behind this is that if you simply made an error and wish to select a different bit of text you can, because the delay hasn’t kicked in.
It’s also worth noting that the mouse pointer icon does change after that short time interval is up, so there is some visual feedback as to what is going on.
That said, on my PowerBook I generally find that the delay is too short for me to make use of it with the trackpad. I guess Apple needs to review things :)
P.S. I didn’t know you were at C4 Tim - wish I could go!
October 22nd, 2006 at 11:21 pm
Mike - no such luck for me. It’s a long way from Melbourne to Chicago.
Even if I went, I don’t think that I would have understood anything past the opening hello, and maybe not even that — [world hello];
I’m just a simple blogger. :)
October 22nd, 2006 at 11:41 pm
Tim: “I’m just a simple blogger. :)”
And Steve Jobs is just a simple saleman…, ____ just a simple ____, etc…
October 23rd, 2006 at 10:32 am
They should start having more conventions in australia. Then I’d be able to afford to go
October 26th, 2006 at 2:57 am
I wonder if this is the trouble I have when I try to drag a bit of text to the desktop as a clipping. I used to do this regularly — usually for snippets of text that I needed only to reference for a few hours. Because I keep my desktop totally clear, keeping there meant that it was accessible immediately and I was reminded to dump it (or, if circumstances had changed, to put it somewhere else to track it).
In OS X I couldn’t get the dragging of selected text to work reliably, but now I think it’s because of this annoying delay.
As for Mike’s comment that there’s visual feedback about when the delay is over, that’s not exactly true. On my system, if I select text, and then click and hold, the pointer doesn’t change until the delay has elapsed AND I move the mouse. Of course, if I move the mouse before the delay has elapsed, the selection is changed. The result? Without realizing it I became trained to hold the mouse steady, and thus never got the all-important visual feedback.
I’m going to try shortening the delay to see if things work more as I expect them to.
October 26th, 2006 at 3:07 am
Oh, it works correctly for me. I click the text and after about half a second, the text cursor changes back to the normal mouse pointer. No dragging required.
Perhaps it is because I’m on a Trackpad, whilst you’e using a mouse?