Can't drag files from a remote vscode window to a local window

[roblourens]

• Have remote and local windows open
• Drag a file from the remote explorer to the local explorer
• Nothing happens

I can do this local -> remote to copy files, and I can do this from a remote vscode window to Finder, but not remote -> local vscode windows.

[isidorn]

The issue here is that the target widnow does not have the remote connection and in this case we can not get the files over in any way.
As @bpasero points out to me this would only work if the target window had the same remote connection

[roblourens]

How is it different from dragging to the desktop though?

[isidorn]

@roblourens good question. For that I believe we have some URI rewritting logic / configuring chrome to be able to get vscode-remote uri content in place done by @alexandrudima
He can provide a code pointer.
And yes it seems, we could discuss if it is possible to use thisa approach when dragging from window to window @bpasero

[bpasero]

For that I believe we have some URI rewritting logic / configuring chrome to be able to get vscode-remote uri content in place done

This only works because we register a protocol handler on the electron main side to handle these URLs.

This would not work on a window that is not connected to the same remote.

[alexdima]

IMHO the drag & drop feature should not be based on the protocol handler we register. I plan to remove that this milestone because we have bugs with missing icons...

[isidorn]

Then it seems we might disable the drag and drop feature from remote to desktop since this only works due to the protocol handler. And I do not see any other way to get this to work.
Though we have an alternative feature context menu -> "Download"

[isidorn]

Looking into a PR to see how feasable this is.

From @bpasero
So it seems obvious that we cannot get the data from the remote because the local window is not connected to that remote. Comparing to web: we support to drop a local file into web where we have a similar problem, since the web cannot read from local files. The code is here:

vscode/src/vs/workbench/contrib/files/browser/views/explorerViewer.ts

Line 937 in 54bccc2

private async handleWebExternalDrop(data: DesktopDragAndDropData, target: ExplorerItem, originalEvent: DragEvent): Promise<void> {

However this is basically just relying on Chrome filling in the right data transfer. What we could possibly do is add to the data transfer another kind with the actual full data of the file. We may need to limit this though to prevent leaks. We already set some custom transfer types here:

vscode/src/vs/workbench/browser/dnd.ts

Line 72 in 54bccc2

export const CodeDataTransfers = {

and could add another one for data.

[Tyriar]

Will cut/copy and paste work as part of this work too? I always do that instead of dragging.

[raisin8010]

need this feature

[dharmjit]

much needed for remote ssh - Linux. For me both local to remote and vice versa is not working.