A brief summary of click-to-raise and drag-and-drop interaction on X11 andWayland

The goal is to be able to drag an icon from a background window without immediately raising that window and obscuring the drop target window when using the click-to-focus mode. This is a barebones description of what needs to happen. It assumes familiarity with code, protocols, etc. as needed.

Quod Video

The articles describes how to get there using both X and Wayland, and it's clear there's still quite a bit of work to do. At least on my KDE Wayland setups, the way it works now is that when I click to drag an icon from a lower Dolphin window to a higher one, it brings the lower window forward, but then, when I hover for a bit over the other window, it brings it back up. Of course, this only works if the destination window remains at least partially visible, which might not always be the case.

For usability's sake, there needs to be an option to start a drag operation from one window to the next without altering the Z-order.