In Windows 10, it is possible to change drag and drop sensitivity. This can be useful if you have a sensitive touchpad and want to make it less sensitive to accidentally moving or copying files in File Explorer and other apps. Or you just might be unhappy with the default setting which requires dragging only a few pixels.
With the default settings, if you drag a file or folder by a distance of 4 pixels and release it, the default drag-and-drop action will occur.
When you drag a file or folder from one location to another in File Explorer, it will offer you to move it or copy it depending on whether you are dragging it to another folder on the same drive, or to another drive.
Because the default value is so low, it is very easy to inadvertently drag and drop your files to a random folder on your drive. It happens to me many times. To overcome this issue, you might want to change the drag-and-drop distance to a higher value. For example, you could set it to 40 pixels, so files and folders have to be moved by at least 40 pixels before you can drop them.
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Unfortunately, Windows 10 does not include any GUI for this option, so it is necessary to apply a Registry tweak. Thankfully, it is not complicated.
To change Drag and Drop Sensitivity in Windows 10, do the following.
- Open the Registry Editor app.
- Go to the following Registry key.
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop
- On the right, modify both DragHeight and DragWidth values and set them to the number of pixels for which to drag items before dropping them.
- To make the changes done by the Registry tweak take effect, you need to sign out and sign in to your user account. Alternatively, you can restart the Explorer shell.
You are done!
Tip: See how to go to a Registry key with one click.
Note: This trick should also work in Windows 7, Windows 8 and Windows 8.1.
To save your time, you can use Winaero Tweaker.
You can download the app here: Download Winaero Tweaker.
That's it!
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This is great, but how do I apply this to all programs? Currently, it only works in windows explorer, so it doesn’t solve the problems inside programs that have drag and drop within them, such as Chrome, Premiere, Photoshop etc
I was pretty sure that it is a global option.
IDK if behavior of Chrome or Photoshop can be changed this way.
I have seen this just in the past week or two, amidst all the Win10 update snafus from MSFT. A particular problem is in Outlook which I use a lot and have a large number of folders to store messages after receiving and reading / responding. Now when I try to drag and drop into an Outlook folder more often than not it ends up in the wrong folder. Sometimes I inadvertently drag a folder and it disappears .. until I do a search in the search bar for a keyword or email address and find it. If I figure it out I will come back, meanwhile any comments appreciated.
Sergei, I follow your blog posts and amazed at the number and breadth of various super help information you provide.
I was having click and drag problems and was pulling my hair out … I found the way to change the drag sensitivity from several places and didn’t seem to help much . Then I thought to check the strength of the AA battery in my mouse and it was down to around 1.2 v. normal 1.5 volt battery. Was especially a problem when I am making images from screenshots e.g., to insert into a PPT or PDF picture show (e.g., of rental home listing). That would require doing many repetitive cut and pastes in MS Paint … draining the battery. After putting in a new battery seems to work great just as before. Obvious but easy to overlook. Hope this is helpful to others.
Just tried this with a value of 2000 but it also disables dragging/moving program windows around, so it is essentially useless. I’m fairly sure this isn’t the intended behaviour? Resetting to default (value: 4) solves the problem.
WT 1.33.0.0, W10 Pro 21H2 19044.1706 x64
Have you tried with a smaller value?
I did now, lots of trial and error. Looking to effectively disable drag and drop, so the highest possible value was needed.
Going down to 350 still fails (windows cannot be moved) but 300 works. Should be good enough to prevent accidental operations in File Explorer.
I don’t know if this number is system-dependent i.e. screen resolution etc. or a Windows limitation.
I thought this only applied to File Explorer, but looks like it’s a Windows (global) setting. This complicates things and I’ll have to further reduce the value.
The tweak works fine, at least below a certain threshold. Thanks for all your work.
You can change these settings immediately, without any need to logout/login or restart the entire Explorer shell, by using this free tool that I wrote: https://lesferch.github.io/DragOptions/
Correct to the above: Restarting the Explorer shell will not make the registry change take effect. It requires a logout/login. The Windows API can change the setting and make it take effect immediately. That’s what the utilities, such as DragOptions, do.