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Comment by cstuder | Hacker News Reader

A notorious issue when doing Windows support (An experience I recommend to every developer!): Double clicking a folder or file in Explorer in order to open it, but slipping the mouse and therefore accidently moving the target into another folder.

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It is an irony that Windows makes keyboard shortcut users out of even non-techies.

Yes, single click, then Enter, that's the winning combo here.

If you're willing to try something a little bit different, Windows also has a single-click to open mode ('View->Options->Change folder and search options' in Win 11). To only select, you point and hover for a moment.

I wish it would let do single click open without hover to select. It's just too easy to mess up your selection if you are not careful where you park your cursor for even a split second.

KDE's Dolphin is much better here, can be set to single click open with drag selection box or click + icon to select.

I know this is a ludicrous way to provide an option to the user instead of just putting it in the UI, but:

- View->Options->Change folder and search options

- Enable single-click, then on the View tab, enable "use check boxes to select items"

- Then Regedit...

- HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Control Panel/Mouse

- Set MouseHoverWidth and MouseHoverHeight to 0, or increase MouseHoverTime.

Now you have single-click without hover-select, and checkboxes to select.

FWIW, you can configure the minimum distance for a mouse move to count as a drag. The default was adequate for 640x480, but maybe should have been increased.

For others: I was curious how to do this, so if you put “change windows drag drop sensitivity” into your search engine of choice you’ll find a tutorial for which registry settings to change.

The default is 4 pixels, which I’m inclined to agree is low these days.

To be more precise, it’s the registry settings HKCU\Control Panel\Desktop\DragWidth and DragHeight. You can also use a tool like Winaero Tweaker to adjust the values.

This happens to me almost daily.

Almost never happens with Mac or Linux. How's that? :)

Do you have your Linux file browser set to click to open or double click to open?

Double click.

Oh, this is the bane of shared network drives.

Ctrl-Z to the rescue!

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