How to paste a folder into a different folder?

You don't have to have a window open to get there. Just place a few strategic shortcuts in the Sidebar. Drag over the sidebar folder and it springs open. Repeat until you drop on the one you want. On Windows, the Favorites don't expand so you have to go down to the bottom and start at the root of the hard drive. Talk about a gigantic mess.

I don't understand having to plan ahead and set things up before you can copy something. Just copy and go where you want to paste it. If you want nice visuals and drag/drop, then open exactly two file manager/filer/file explorer windows exposing the source and destination windows and drag something over. Holding a mouse button down for that move is not nearly as hard as knowing what situations would have some other method available. Or undoing the surprising result when some quirky variation does something you didn't expect.

Command-clicking to deselect doesn't seem to work. Right-clicking to bring up the context menu to paste always selects whatever is underneath the cursor again.

I guess it either has to be in 'empty' space if the view doesn't fill the screen and you can position below existing items, or in icon view where there are spaces between icons, or you have to move up a level and have the parent folder selected. Seems oddly inconsistent.

I was afraid that pasting a same-named folder with the parent selected would replace the parent, but it doesn't - the past consistently goes a level below the selected folder (and warns before replacing in that case). Same with option-drag but I can never remember which drag variation copies and which moves which is why I like the context menus where cut/copy are spelled out for you.

Thanks, but given a finder window in list view of a folder already containing enough folders to fill the screen, I don't see any way to resize and create 'empty' space. And if I select an existing folder the copy will go inside it instead of at the level I want. Is this only possible if the target window is in icon view? Or with a tiny number of existing items?

I like right-click context menus to pick copy and paste because they work the same in windows/linux so I don't have to think about which I am using. Option-drag would still have the same problem I think, when the target window is filled with a list view of other subfolders. There is nowhere but lower-level folders to release the drag. And if I move to the parent folder where I want it, what happens if the folder I am adding is named the same?

I think most of these answers are missing the point that I have the target folder open in the view that you get by double-clicking it and setting 'list' view. That is, you don't see the folder parent itself in the left panel, just the contents. If, and only if, I can find some 'empty' space in this folder I am able to paste or drop. However a list view with sub-folder contents filling the screen has no such empty space and any attempt will instead land in whatever sub-folder happened to be under the cursor.

The solution seems to be that you have to re-navigate up a level and hit the small target of the parent folder, so you can't see what is already there and add something new at the same time. Or you need to not double-click when navigating in finder so as to leave the parent folder name visible on the left.

Yes, I see the parent folder name in the window title, but right-clicking there does not offer 'paste' as a choice in the context menu. And there is no place in the open window of contents to paste that would not land in a sub-folder. Nothing changes in the state of the active window when this happens.

Column view does leave the parent folder showing as a possible target but it gets ugly with a deep tree structure.

OK, but you've selected something that is not a sub-folder before the paste. Show me how to do it when there is no space on the screen which is not a sub-folder and wouldn't be even if you make the window as tall as the screen.

Barney-15E wrote:

You don't right-click. You just paste.

The option to right-click and paste offered by dialabrain is a method of establishing the Active folder. The one you right-click is the active folder. However, if you have multiple selected, it is not the active folder.

I want to paste by picking paste from the context menu. How do you get a context menu offering paste without right-clicking? Or without the side effect of selecting the sub-folder that appears under the cursor when there is no empty space in the target window.

You don't need a contextual menu in that case. Just paste (cmd-v, or cmd-opt-v to Move).

You do if you are in List View and want to paste into a specific subfolder of the hierarchy, then you need to ensure the destination folder is the only selected folder, and then use the contextual menu item. If you have multiple items selected, you cannot paste from the contextual menu. A contextual menu isn't a shortcut for the main menu commands. It is a specialized menu designed for the thing you have selected.

Does that mean it is impossible to do with the mouse in list view where the parent is not a selectable target? I don't want to have to remember all the quirks of cmd/option/control key variations across different OS versions, and if I wanted to use the keyboard I'd have opened a terminal window and typed the paths in to avoid the inconsistency in the first place.