Automatic scrolling while dragging is not intuitive

[joshm33333]

Just a user here, and a developer of my own projects, with a serious issue with the way dragging blocks is handled.
When you drag an element and move the cursor slightly, the screen moves slowly, move the cursor further, and the screen moves faster... cool right? but wait, what do i do if i want to stop scrolling and drop the block? i have to find the spot on the screen where i started scrolling? thats nuts

i mean, i don't think, i need to provide examples and context. i can't be the only one that feels this way. it's literally useless and almost stops me from dragging altogether

[mapk]

I'm running into this problem continually as well. It is frustrating and not easy to drop a block in a specific location without the page continuing to scroll.

Not sure how to solve this technically. Does the screen just stop scrolling when the cursor stops moving? That doesn't seem robust enough.

[mapk]

Somewhat related: #23082

[talldan]

@mapk You have to move the mouse back to approximately where you started dragging from to stop the scrolling.

When #23082 was originally merged, I tried two things to improve it:

• Try using a percentage based calculation for block drag scrolling velocity. #23448, which reduced the speed of the scrolling behavior and made it proportional to screen size. This received positive feedback and was merged.
• Try using the scroll container boundaries to determine scroll velocity #23446, which only scrolls when dragging near the edge of the screen. This didn't really get any feedback, so was closed.

Maybe give #23446 a try if it still works.

[mapk]

You have to move the mouse back to approximately where you started dragging from to stop the scrolling.

This is so difficult when where my mouse began the drag isn't aligning with where I'm trying to drop the block. I'll check out 23446.

[joshm33333]

The fundamental problem is that you can't drop an item while the screen is moving even a tiny bit. It's not something current browsers handle well, and for good reason, nobody is asking for it.

So, therefore, scrolling and dragging must not both be anchored to the same interaction. Like, I think it's fairly obvious. It's like having your gas and your brake on the same pedal.

Either add a second interaction, like using arrow keys to scroll, or have visually indicated areas that enabled scrolling, kind of like the default behavior that we all have muscle memory for, maybe just adding a visual to show that reaching the top or bottom of the screen scrolls would have been plenty.

As I've said with so many things about Gutenberg, please consider making it an option you can both toggle in the menu, and force in functions.php.

[lelas]

Also a mere user here who's frustrated with blocks inability to drag & drop properly.

I second @joshm33333's idea for a toggle. Would be great with an option to disable scrolling while dragging + a scroll zone in the bottom/top. Working with columns where there is a need to drag content is currently nearly impossible. The slightest drag and the page scrolls and in far too many cases, the content you drag drops in a completely random position. I just spent several hours creating a simple sitemap (also took longer due to

tags getting added around and after block tags seemingly at random, which messes up the layout entirely, but that's a different matter) that should have taken ~15 minutes.

[subnoodle]

It's still anyoing to drag a block while editor content scrolls.
Would be best solution with @lelas: You cannot drag a block outside editors viewport without scrolling. So, scrolling areas on top and bottom would work out fine, in my opinion.