Sigh. Don't they look mac-like?

Also, it does depend on having what GNOME calls a 'spatial' file manager, where you can have one window open for one directory and a different window for another directory. Then if you are doing some work in a directory, you almost certainly have a file window open for it anyway.

(I used to be strongly in favour of this multiple-window style, and found the lack of it on Windows and other clunky interfaces highly annoying. I assumed the lack of a spatial file manager must be a side-effect of the colossally stupid 'multiple document interface' where each application has one big window inside which you can rearrange other windows, and also a side-effect of the aforementioned window manager problem making it impossible to overlap windows, and other Redmondian blunders. But nowadays, with the popularity of web browsers which display a single page at a time and offer 'back' and 'forward', I am not quite so certain. Perhaps a browser-style file manager might have some value after all.)

Note that you only need to drag-save once, to choose the destination directory; after that you just hit 'save'.

What *should* happen, IMNSHO, is that the app should pop up a new window on *your existing file manager*, in the app's current directory. So no horrible per-app file managers and no mad alt-tab horror.

So you want to save a file. You normally work with your app maximized; your file manager is minimized, entirely obscured by the app, or on a different virtual desktop altogether. So where do you drag the app to? You have to hold down the mouse button and simultaneously alt-tab (or similarly keyboard-navigate) your way to the file manager to drop it in there... and then you might well find out that it's in the right place.

On RISC OS, I used to work a lot more with multiple visible windows, despite the ridiculously small screen area by today's standards. However, I'll concede that saving did usually involve bringing the file manager into view, but since the RISC OS Desktop let you preserve window depth - it wasn't the obsessive "pop everything to the top" behaviour seen almost everywhere today - you could actually work with the file manager on top of an application if that was convenient.

Nowadays, with the various dragging operations on desktops like KDE actually supporting navigation - you drag a file onto an application in the desktop pager applet and it makes that application visible - drag saving becomes more viable again. And another thing about the RISC OS drag-saving was that it wasn't just the file manager that supported saving: you could save into other applications in many situations.

My point was that preconceptions about such features should be reevaluated periodically, especially when related features like drag-loading are supported, rather than everyone deciding that something will forever be "wrong", presumably because their Amiga didn't support it or because the usability hammer, Fitt's Law, can be selectively interpreted to claim that it's a bad thing.