DragDrop

Have you ever noticed how a lot of things (specially web apps) now expect you to drag files into them, rather than using the good ol' file browser dialog? But doing that it's not particularly comfortable when you don't really use a file manager, or prefer a command line one.

So instead of having to launch a graphical file manager each time you need some files dragged, you can use dragdrop to get a quick pop-up dialog with files ready to drag right from the terminal.

You can run something like

dragdrop file1.png file2.txt file3.cc

to get a source to drag files from, or just

dragdrop

on its own to get a sink to drop files into, which will then print their names into the standard output.

See the manual at dragdrop(1) for all the detailed options, and maybe check the examples to see how you can use it in a script.

Installation

The easiest way to try DragDrop is grabbing the AppImage from the releases. Just download the file and make it executable like so:

# Maybe give it a more convenient name.
mv DragDrop-*.AppImage dragdrop

# And now it should work as expected.
chmod +x dragdrop
./dragdrop --help

If you'd rather not run random files from the internet, and DragDrop is not available from your favourite distro's repositories, you'll need to build it from source. So first you have to install its dependencies.

Package naming is not consistent across all distributions, but you'll probably have some luck with these:

# For Debian, Ubuntu, and derivatives:
apt install build-essential cmake qtbase5-dev go-md2man

# For Arch, Manjaro, and the rest:
pacman -S base-devel cmake qt5-base go-md2man

Once that's installed, you can use CMake to build the program with the commands

cmake -S . -B build -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release
cmake --build build
cmake --install build

which should build and install DragDrop into the /usr/local prefix by default.