[panic]

I always liked how Hearthstone (the digital card game) combines this style of interaction with traditional drag-and-drop. If you click and drag a card, you drop it by releasing the mouse button as you traditionally would. But if you click the card without dragging, the card is picked up and remains held until you drop it by clicking again. You can choose which interaction you want in the moment, and the combination feels quite natural.

[DarylZero]

Every chess program I can remember is also like that (xboard, lichess, chess.com).

[wruza]

Also, most strategy games use left button select, right button go-to, which is ~sort of similar.

[sleightofmind]

The gnome aisleriot collection of solitaire games has something similar. Select menu item Control, then Click To Move. It's not quite as visual as what you describe, though. Once you get used to it, conventional drag and drop is a pain.

Another solitaire game did it even better -- more visually -- PySol maybe?

Although I am not a programmer, I "wrote" a program to allow rebar detailers to create bar lists and cut lists for bills of material for rebar fabricators. For moving whole line items, I required the user to:

* Highlight some portion of each of the lines to be moved. * Click a target line. * Enter A or B to move the selected line items above or below the target line. This allowed me to paste above the topmost line.

Now admittedly, while this is a bit clunky and woefully unconventional, I did this because I didn't want to stop and learn the drag and drop protocol for Tkinter -- again, I'm not a programmer. But there was also concern on my part that eventual users could misplace some line item in the middle of a big group of lines inadvertently, and not be able to easily reconstruct what had just happened.

Conventional drag and drop is seemingly designed to increase fatigue and error, and diminish patience.

I just wanted to make something I could use and perhaps polish it later for use by others. I scratched my immediate itch, and the secondary itch hasn't flared up for quite some time.

[francoismassot]

Yes indeed, love that too, "Click and Drop" is nice.