Picknplace.js, an alternative to drag-and-drop
Details
- External ID
- 46290349
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- Picknplace.js, an alternative to drag-and-drop
- Website domain
- jgthms.com
- Launched
- Dec. 16, 2025
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 455
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.9866412213740458
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
Description
I find that the drag and drop experience can quickly become a nightmare, especially on mobile. To tap, hold, drag, and scroll, all at the same time, is both difficult to achieve, and prone to errors. I've always had in mind this 2-step approach, where picking an element and placing it were two separate steps. So I implemented this basic version to showcase my idea.While it might take more time than a regular drag and drop, the benefit is for people who struggle with holding down the mouse button. With picknplace.js, you only need two clicks and some scrolling.This solution is meant as an experiment, so I'm open to discussion.
Enrichment
- Theme
- indie puzzle and logic games
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Dev tools
- Audience
- Developer
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- alternative to drag-and-drop interactions
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
Yes It is a lightweight front-end vanilla JavaScript DOM manipulation library implementing a click-to-pick and click-to-place interaction pattern.
Discussion
20 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: Anytype.io (mobile app move function), Google Maps choose on map
Concerns raised: Bugs on Firefox mobile with scrolling past top/bottom of list, Selected item state not visually clear enough, Doesn't work well with multi-select/moving multiple items, Place button position unintuitive and hard to locate, Movement skips multiple spots when scroll speed is increased
Feature requests: Multi-select support with shift-click and command-click for consecutive/non-consecutive items, More obvious visual feedback (drop shadow, scale, border, hole where item was picked), Keyboard accessibility (tab/arrows to navigate, enter to pick/drop), Move selected element to side basket/drawer instead of inline positioning
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 37 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #1 of 38 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Looks like the first mover among its competitors.
- Fingerball · ph · 2026-09-08 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.43
- EmailArch · ph · 2026-09-13 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.40
- DROP · Catch the Ball in 540ms · ph · 2026-09-08 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.39
- TwoOneGo · ph · 2026-09-16 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.39
- I saw this cool navigation reveal, so I made a simple HTML+CSS version · hn · 2026-02-07 · 141 upvotes · similarity 0.37
- Data-anim · hn · 2026-03-14 · 19 upvotes · similarity 0.36
- canvas · github · 2026-09-22 · 7 upvotes · similarity 0.36
- Domphy · hn · 2026-06-19 · 11 upvotes · similarity 0.35
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
Nobody's really built a dev tools tool for Sales yet.