I’m probably the last person to discover this, but I haven’t seen it mentioned anywhere before.
I just noticed that you can drag the path from the parent-folders button (at the bottom left of a GNOME file manager window) to the file chooser dialog’s location entry, which is convenient when you are opening or saving from an application and happen to have a folder open in a window already.
However, it doesn’t deal well with spaces, for instance. It escapes them as %20 though the file chooser dialog expects them to be unescaped. This could be very useful with a little work.
It would also be nice if the drop worked on the path bar too, and if I could drag from the window’s title bar.
Just drop it on the folder view instead of the Location entry. That also deals nicely with folders that have spaces and other weird characters. Dragging also works much nicer in the Browse view of Nautilus where can you drag directly from the path bar or Location entry. Spatial mode is such a pain.
Now, what would be really cool is if the dialogue would work the other way around as well. Say I have a nautilus window open in the location where I want to save a new AbiWord document. I open the Save As dialogue, enter the desired document name and then drag an icon from the dialogue to the Nautilus window…
Magnus, that’s what the XDS protocol was designed for. It’s for example implemented in GIMP 2.3. But you also need support from the file-manager, see bug 171655.
Dragging also works much nicer in the Browse view of Nautilus where can you drag directly from the path bar or Location entry. Spatial mode is such a pain.