Drop Drawers can have any number of drawers showing or on disk. Each drawer is a self-contained file which can be moved around and passed to other users of Drop Drawers.

Types of drawer

Drop Drawers currently offers two types of drawer - clip drawers and process drawers. Clip drawers are the mostly commonly-used type and can be used to store text snippets, pictures, URLs, aliases to files, scripts, sounds, movies and anything else. The user is in full control of what a clip drawer contains. Process drawers perform a separate function by providing a list of all the applications running on your computer and the user cannot add more items to this type of drawer.

Creating drawers

To create a new drawer, use the New submenu of the File menu. Choose Clip Drawer or Process Drawer to create a new drawer based on the default settings. Alternatively, choose an item below the separator to create a new drawer based on one of the available drawer templates, which are stored in the Drawer Templates folder (see the About Drawer Templates document in that folder for more information.) Any new drawer file will automatically be placed in the Drawers folder in your Preferences folder (but can be subsequently moved) and you will be presented with the Drawer Options window allowing you to change many of the drawer’s settings.

Moving, sizing, expanding and contracting a drawer

Drawers and their tabs can be resized using the shaded corner adjusters. Once the drawer is sized correctly, choose Lock Drawer and Tab Size from the Placement panel in the Drawer Options window (see next topic) and the adjusters will disappear. Alternatively, press Command-S. (Please note that, if a drawer sets its size automatically, some of its dimensions will be fixed and the adjusters may not appear. This applies to all process drawers, clip drawers with certain arranging options and tabs whose size is set automatically. Changes can be made to these settings in the drawer’s options window.)

Drawers are expanded and contracted by clicking the tab or dragging it towards or away from the screen edge. Unless automatic expanding has been switched off for a drawer, it will also open automatically when the mouse touches the edge of the screen within the tab and close again when the mouse leaves.

Drawers can be placed on any side of any screen by dragging the tab along the screen edge or using the Placement panel in the Drawer Options window (see next topic). Drawer tabs can be moved relative to the drawer by Command-dragging.

Filing operations on drawers

Existing drawer files can be opened by double-clicking in the Finder or choosing Open Drawer… from the main File menu. To close a drawer, choose Close from the main File menu or from the File submenu of a drawer’s contextual menu (accessible by control-clicking). To close a drawer and move its file to the trash, choose Delete…. To hide a drawer, choose Hide. Hidden drawers continue to respond to key presses and speech recognition but are no longer displayed on screen. To show a hidden drawer, choose the drawer’s name from the Drawer menu in Drop Drawers (it will be displayed in italics).

Information within clip drawer files is stored as efficiently as possible. However, over time, clip drawer files may begin to contain wasted space (similar to disk fragmentation). To free up this space, choose Compress from the File sub-menu in the clip drawer’s contextual menu. The menu item will tell you how much disk space compression will save. You may want to compress a clip drawer before sending it to someone else, e.g. over email.

Saving drawers

There is no need for you to save your drawers manually – underlying Drop Drawers is a robust database engine which automatically saves the necessary parts of drawers whenever necessary.