Displaying Items

You can also drag items to other windows with the Action or Assist Mouse Keys in Dired, Buffer Menu, Ibuffer and Treemacs listing buffers, rather than the buffers themselves. Dragging Hyperbole buttons to display their referents in another window works too.

Drag with the Action or Assist Mouse Key and the selected item’s referent will be displayed in any Emacs window in which you release. Drag outside Emacs and it will be displayed in a new frame. To display the last item you want within the listing window itself, press and release the Action Key on that item after dragging your other items to their respective windows. Remember that you can emulate these drags from the keyboard when needed, see Keyboard Drags.

So now you can put a bunch of buffers and files on your screen wherever you like. Typically, a brief visual pulse is shown first at the source item and then in the destination window, to help you see that the transfer has been made. An Assist Key drag will move the the item list buffer to the destination (swapping buffers), just as it does with other buffers.