Currently, when dragging and dropping files in Dolphin, a context menu appears asking whether to “Move Here”, “Copy Here”, or “Link Here”. While holding Shift during drag-and-drop forces a move, there is no way to set “Move” as the default action without using a modifier key.
Request:
Please add a setting in Dolphin’s preferences to allow users to choose the default drag-and-drop behavior without seeing a menu. For example:
Move by default (like Windows Explorer)
Copy by default
Always ask Move here, Copy here or Link here ( which is the current behavior)
Rationale:
Improves efficiency for users who primarily move files rather than copy them.
Reduces repetitive use of modifier keys.
Aligns with user expectations from other file managers (e.g., Windows Explorer).
Apart from the original (sane) behaviour, there’s an option to have it decide whether to ‘move’ or ‘copy’ depending on what domain it gets dropped in with Shift being required to pull up the menu.
You won’t see it if you’re running an older version of Plasma, however.
I decided to format shift my family’s CDs, so I have been doing a lot of copying from CDs. Move makes no sense as the source is read only. IMO dolphin should at least default to copy if the source is removable, as linking is unlikely to be good.
Thank you very much for the the information. My KDE Plasma version is 5.27.12. I will wait until I update from Kubuntu 24.04 that I have to 26.04 and it will automatically get for me the latest Plasma.
