GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 736434
Should be possible to drag multiple messages simultaneously
Last modified: 2019-01-15 06:40:08 UTC
In most mail clients, you can select multiple messages at a time and then drag them all to a target folder. However, in Geary, while you can select multiple messages, when you initiate the drag, the selection reverts to only the message which the mouse pointer happens to be on top of when the mousedown occurs. If the current message is already selected, then the mousedown should not change the selection unless a drag is not initiated before mouseup. This is in 0.6.3, which appears to be the latest version available to ubuntu (including via the Yorba PPA).
This was originally reported in bug #714070, although the final solution to closing that ticket had to do with right-clicking to bring up the selection menu, not dragging messages. The behavior you're describing appears to be the behavior of GtkTreeView. We could find nothing obvious we were doing wrong or how to change GtkTreeView's operation. Note that if you Ctrl+Click to multi-select and then, when you click on the last item, hold the button down and begin dragging, it will work. I'll leave this open because I too would like to see this fixed. Note that moving to GtkListBox (bug #720850) might solve this issue.
What if I'm selecting all items in a mailbox, though? There's no extant click when pressing ^A. :) (Of course, shift-clicking should work, as would ^A then two ctrl-clicks.)
I seem to have found a workaround - after making the message selections, holding shift while doing the click to initiate the drag allows me to drag the selected items. It's inelegant but at least it makes it possible to do what I need.
I don't know if something changed or if I just never verified the behavior in the past, but while the message view is allowing the drag to initiate, at this time (0.8.1-1 on Xubuntu) no action is actually performed when the multiple-selection drag takes place; the UI indicates that the messages will be moved, but they just stay where they were.
Where are you dropping the messages? Geary has a bug where you can drag the messages anywhere on the tree, but in fact can only move/copy the messages if the destination folder is part of the same account. Also, are you holding down any modifier keys (Ctrl in particular) while dragging? They will turn the drop operation into a copy.
I am dropping the messages on another folder on the same account. I release the shift modifier as soon as I start the drag. The specific sequence of events: 1. Click on first message in folder 2. Press shift 3. Click on last message in folder 4. Release shift 5. Drag messages to the other folder The UI responds as if the messages will be moved, but nothing happens when I drop them.
When you release the shift in step 4, is the mouse button still down?
Yes. I suppose I should have phrased that as 3. Press the mouse button on the last message in folder and added: 6. Release the mouse button
I just tried that now, moving messages from the Trash to my Inbox, and it worked fine. What folder are the messages in, and where are you dragging them to?
They are in a folder called "review" and I am moving them to a folder called "train-spam." Both are subfolders of the inbox.
If it makes any difference, the server is running Dovecot.
Also, just now I tried again, and it failed the first time (only moved a single message), but succeeded the second time. The second time I selected the bottom message first (and extended the selection to the top of the message list), so that might have made a difference.
I'm still unable to reproduce this. Can you generate a screencast so I can see what's going on?
It looks like it's been fixed already; my Geary has been recently updated to 0.8.2-1, which means it was probably fixed long ago. Resolving as obsolete.
Hm, it just happened to me again, but I figured out the rhyme or reason - if I switch to a folder and then try extending the selection from the default-selected message, the drag fails, but if I click onto another message and then redo the same selection, the drag succeeds. Also, this time, the first drag did make the messages appear to move into the other folder but they bounced back into the originating one a second later.
*** Bug 754397 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
I confirm the bug. This is the workaround that is working for me: - select each conversation holding the shift - when you arrive at the last one keep holding the shift, click with the mouse and start dragging - then release the Shift If you release the Shift before clicking you will lose the selection. But the expected behaviour is how drag&drop works in Nautilus: - select the items holding the Shift or Ctrl key - release the keys and click on the selection to drag them, *without losing the selection*
Resolving as obsolete all bugs that should be resolved by the conversation list redesign (https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=730682). I'd mark them as a duplicate, but bz won't let me :( Apologies for the noise.