Question: do Windows/Linux support drag operation for other kinds of data (e.g. text, image, ...)? Mac does, that's why I'm asking. It actually works like a clipboard for that. So, like in #1221, we can start by only supporting one kind of data (i.e. paths) but it'd be nice to have a rough idea how things could be extended to support other data formats.

In that respect, maybe a different API would be good. With 3.x we can think about using std::variant-like. But if we want to have something in 2.x, maybe something like this could be more flexible:

struct Data {
  template <T> T get();
  bool isPath(); // if true then get<String> is legal
  bool isImage(); // if true then get<Image> is legal
  // ...

  // or maybe something like that:
  struct Kind { Path, Image, ... };
  Kind getKind();
};


/* implementation defined */ Cookie;

struct DropEvent {
  Cookie cookie;
};

struct Window {
  // Let's say the Data for a Cookie is valid at least until
  // the next display/popEvent/whatever makes sense.
  Data getDropData(Cookie);

  void enableDropData(Kind kind, bool enable);
};

What do you think?

It looks like Linux does? It sends a MIME type with the data, from what I can tell here and the code from the link at the end of the issue text (although I'll admit I didn't understand most from either places).

Windows does seem to, since I just dragged highlighted text from Firefox directory to Visual Studio and it put the text in the editor. I can also drag an image directly from Firefox into MS Paint. (I'm lost trying to find documentation on how this works though. It seems related to clipboard formats? From what I read here, Windows can actually give multiple formats at once.)

The API just proposed can't support Windows having multiple types at once, so if that is chosen SFML would need to decide what is best and only give that (or generate an event for each supported type, but that doesn't sound good either).

Linux supports multiple formats as well. A lot of software wrongly just chooses the first in the list, which causes things to not work properly quite often (try dragging some selected text to Dolphin for example, the first entry is a pointer to the text rather than the text itself (a later option), and it writes 4/8 bytes (the pointer itself) to a new file. Always give the option to specify the formats and give the list of all available on linux.

Has there been any progress? Fytch's idea seems outstanding.

A bit late here, but instead of storing a raw pointer (not very user friendly) why not wrapping it into a custom class, which will manage it properly without any risks?
(and maybe then implement a forEach function or use iterators to iterate in the list, just like a std::vector or a std::list would, (we could even use std::list maybe? since I don't see a reason not to have FIFO behavior while reading the content of any drag'n drop event)

I don't know how much could be implemented of hat I said, or even if it is relevant since I am not a maintainer of the library, just a random user sorry in advance

Think this is superseded by #2265 so can be closed

Superseded by #2265