1. Drag onto Mission Control
Start dragging the file, then press Control + ↑ — or swipe up with three fingers — without letting go. Mission Control opens mid-drag. Hover the desktop or window you want, wait for it to come forward, and drop.
This is built into macOS and costs nothing. It wants a steady hand: you are holding a drag through a full-screen animation, and letting go in the wrong half-second puts the file on a desktop rather than in the window you meant.
2. Spring-load the Dock or a folder
Hold the file over an app icon in the Dock and the app comes forward. Hold it over a folder in Finder and the folder opens. Both are called spring-loading, and the delay is adjustable in System Settings under Accessibility → Pointer Control.
Good for a destination that is already in the Dock. No use at all if the app is not running, or if what you want is a specific window of it.
3. Stage Manager
With Stage Manager on, the other windows sit as thumbnails down the left. Drag a file onto one and it comes forward. It is the tidiest of the built-in answers, and it costs you the rest of Stage Manager, which is a whole way of working rather than a feature you can borrow for one drag.
4. Put it down somewhere and come back
The other three all hold the drag the whole way. A shelf does not: you drop the file once, let go, and pick it up again whenever you are ready. That is the difference, and it is the only one of the four that survives a phone call in the middle.
- Open the corner. Push the pointer into the corner of the screen and hold it there for about half a second. An arc of cards swings out.
- Drop the file on it. Drag the file from the first window onto the arc and let go. The file does not move on disk — the card is a reference to where it already is.
- Go and find the destination. Close the first window, switch spaces, open whatever you need. The shelf keeps the file.
- Drag it off again. Open the corner again and drag the card into the destination window. It arrives as the file itself, exactly as if it had come from Finder.
Nothing is copied or moved. The card holds a reference to the file where it already lives, so taking it out of the shelf leaves the original untouched — see what it does and does not replace.
Which one to use
- Both windows visible. Drag straight across. Nothing beats it.
- Destination is one space away. Mission Control.
- Destination is in the Dock. Spring-load it.
- You do not know yet, or it will take a minute to find. Put it on a shelf. Tray is one.