Comment 23 for bug 61237

I agree that always having some usable white space in list view is very important. My usual workaround is to view the parent folder of the folder that I want to drag to, and then drag to the folder's icon, or right click it and select paste into folder, but having white space is useful for other reasons as well. I frequently create new folders or files through the right-click context menu, and this is not possible on a full list view, so I have to use the main window menu.

One solution would be to do something similar to Windows Explorer, where only the actual file name is an active object, and the rest of the details are just non-interactive background text (even the blank space within the name column is non-clickable). I think there are some definite improvements that could be made over Microsoft's implementation though, for example having a light outline and highlighting around the filename to indicate the interactive area. Also, it would be nice if the interactive area was always at least 1/3 or 1/4 of the name column's width, so really short filenames don't get accidentally missed when lassoing a bunch of files. One other MS flaw that should be avoided is that in Windows Explorer, the interactive area is often smaller than the actual filename text, maybe because I use a non-standard font in Windows, I don't really know.