Comment 42 for bug 61237

<rant>
This issue has been solved decades ago by the same engineers who designed one of the first successful GUIs: the Macintosh. IIRC this feature was available ever since I remember using a Mac, and that means ~ Mac OS 6, in the late 1980s.

It is a shame that in 2009 we're having this discussion. Anyone who cares about user interfaces should study the history of the Macintosh.

It's fine to evolve new features if they don't exist in previous works or if the alternatives can be made better. But if they just work, and are almost perfect, you just copy them. Why try to change the behaviour of the Mac OS Finder in this respect? Drag and drop in the Mac is the example that all OSes should follow. Anyone trying to come up with something better should think twice, and present strong arguments.
</rant>

In the Mac, dragging a file to a window containing other folders (in any view: list/icons) just works because there is always "white space" anywhere ... only the icon (or in a list view, the leftmost column) is the object that gets highlighted (activated) upon passing the mouse over (or when dropping a file). If you don't want to drop a file in a subfolder just drag it elsewhere.

In gnome, I guess that the essential mistake is having the space in the list view be treated as a table with rows = files or folders. The consequence is that there is almost no neutral places in the window (non-objects) to drop files to.