Faster text dragging in Cocoa apps (like Mail)
Sunday, October 22nd, 2006
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]
