Why can't I drag and drop documents into folder on desktop post macOS sonoma?

vesque (see above) had the solution that worked for me. In OS Sonoma on my MacBook, a lighter pressure on the trackpad till a subtle click is felt will permit drag and drop. Firm pressure opens a preview of the file. Extremely annoying to those of us who are accustomed to the old click and drag but are uninformed about this feature.

There are TWO different settings that need to be adjusted for this:

1. Accessibility > Pointer Control > Trackpad Options > Turn ON "Use trackpad for dragging" and set "Dragging Style" to Without Drag Lock.
2. Trackpad > Point & Click (you land here by default) > Turn OFF "Force Click and haptic feedback"

I had to do BOTH of these things for the drag-and-drop functionality to return to normal, where a regular/hard press selects the item and you continue holding down to drag it to where you want.

(If you want to not have to hold it down while you drag, check out the other options under the "Dragging Style" options in Accessibility settings above.)

CORRECTION: This does work! I was in the Pointer & Trackpad settings under Accessibility which is why I didn't see it at first, but there are additional trackpad settings under Trackpad in the left nav of settings. That's where you can find the "Force Click and haptic feedback" setting. Turning that off worked for me, as the original poster said.

i fixed it by pressing down with 2 fingers onto my desktop then selecting the "show view options." at the top it says "stack by:" there's a drop down menu and i selected the "none" option.

hope this works!

seekir wrote:

vesque (see above) had the solution that worked for me. In OS Sonoma on my MacBook, a lighter pressure on the trackpad till a subtle click is felt will permit drag and drop. Firm pressure opens a preview of the file. Extremely annoying to those of us who are accustomed to the old click and drag but are uninformed about this feature.

Turn off the Force Click gesture, or don’t press that hard.

M3 Pro, MacOS 14.3.1. I had a similar problem and the fix might apply here. Trying to drag & drop an attachment into email (Thunderbird), it kept opening a preview & I couldn't drag it into the email program. I turned off "Force Click and haptic feedback" in the trackpad settings and it now works like MacOS did for decades. HTH.

Hi All,

Settings > Accessibility > Pointer control > Turn on Spring loading

Should be resolved.

Enjoy ;)

Relaunching Finder (🍎 > Force Quit > Finder > Relaunch) was the solution that worked for me.

I found the answer! I couldn't handle that lightly pressing thing.

Go to Settings > Trackpad > Disable "Force click and haptic feedback".

joy … simple drag and drop functionality is back!

Hi,

Sonoma 14.4.1

Go to : Settings > Accessibility > Pointer control

Use button [Trackpad Options...] and enable Use trackpad for dragging.

I spent an hour on this! Here is what finally worked:

• Right-click on empty space on desktop
• Uncheck "Use Stacks"

Problem solved!!

I spent days looking for THE SOLUTION. What 100 Worked for me was ODD. Booting into safe mode. It cleared cache that needed to go. Reboot and you got your drag and drop back

I have been having this problem. What just worked for me, and I hope continues to work, is more lightly pressing track pad on the file I want to drag. If you click down all the way on the track pad, the file won't "take" to be dragged/moved.

I found this in Settings:

Accessibility > Trackpad options > Use trackpad for dragging

Before that I was able only to drag folders or files if they were shown as icons in Finder. So that works too.

None of it worked. This did:

Finder

View

Sort by

"none"