I have built up a pretty good workflow in the terminal. The main thing that I was missing until now was an easy way to drag and drop the files that I am looking at in a terminal to other apps.

So far, whenever I wanted to share a file from the terminal I would open up a GUI file browser, navigate to that directory, find the file and then drag and drop it. Not anymore. I recently was able to cobble together a pretty good(IMO) for dragging and dropping files to GUI applications and thought I would share.

Drag and drop workflow

Here is what is happening in the video. I am in a project repo in which I have listed the files in the current directory using ls. Now I just double-click on the file that I want to share, it bring up a thing (dragon) from which I can just drag and drop into slack.

Now let us see how to get this workflow. The main tool that is helping with this is dragon (https://github.com/mwh/dragon). Here is how you use it:

dragon Using the above will open a window from which you can drag and drop. You can pass -x to close it automatically after you share one item.

It is already great on its own, but let’s wire it up so that we can bring this up when we double-click on a filename. This is done using tmux.

bind -n DoubleClick1Pane run-shell “dragon -x ‘#{pane_current_path}/#{mouse_word}’”

What is happening here is that when you double-click on something, tmux end up calling dragon with pane_current_path(pwd of current shell) + / + mouse_word(whitespace separated piece of text under cursor) which ends up as path to the file. You can probably have it be more intelligent by separately passing it onto a script that only adds pane_current_path if and only if mouse_word is not a file or even search backwards/forwards for that file, but I just went with a simpler implementation as I will be mostly selecting after typing ls.

Another possibility is that you can just wire it up with ranger (https://github.com/ranger/ranger) or lf (https://github.com/gokcehan/lf) and open dragon up like that.

I do end up taking and sharing a lot of screenshots, and so I have a special case for that. Every time I take a screenshot, the path is automatically copied to my clipboard. Now, in my wm (i3 (https://github.com/i3/i3)), I have a keybinding that will open up the path in clipboard with dragon. Here is the code for that:

bindsym $mod+Mod1+Control+Shift+l exec “dragon -x $(pbpaste)”

With this, after I take a screenshot I can press $mod+Mod1+Control+Shift+l and have that window to share it. About the keybinding, it actually ends up as tab+shift+l for me after remappings for those wondering how on earth I am remembering/pressing them

BONUS: The above explained setup is Linux only, but if you are on macOS, I was using something really hacky with hammerspoon to do something similar: https://github.com/meain/dotfiles/blob/master/hammerspoon/.config/hammerspoon/slackdrop.lua (https://github.com/meain/dotfiles/blob/master/hammerspoon/.config/hammerspoon/slackdrop.lua) . This essentially just end up emulating the keybindings necessary to upload a file (from path in clipboard) from the slack UI.

And that is it. Enjoy sticking to just a terminal.