Some projects keep surprising me with their “solutions,” and this is one of those cases. A proposal under review by developers from GNOME and Mozilla could change how middle-mouse-button paste behaves on Linux and other Unix-like systems.
The discussions, visible in Mozilla’s Phabricator revision D277804 and a linked GNOME gsettings-desktop-schemas merge request, focus on disabling the traditional primary selection paste by default.
Mozilla proposes changing the default behavior of the Firefox browser on Unix builds so that pressing the middle mouse button no longer pastes text by default. The author of the revision frames the current behavior as a source of confusion and accidental pastes, especially when users press the middle button without expecting the clipboard contents to be inserted into text fields.
I think the open in new tab behavior/ do the scroll thing makes more sense for the middle click.
I understand how useful it is to quickly paste selected text, and have used it frequently, but I finally had enough of it after the thousandth time accidentally pasting private information or random garbage into a new tab search, discord chats, or the middle of my code without realizing it…
I think their proposal to make it a toggle that is off by default is the best solution. A lot more people are adopting Linux now and this will be one less point of friction for the new user experience coming from Windows, thus making it more likely they’ll stick with the OS, and old users who are setting up a fresh install will just switch it back to the previous behavior as they configure their system, and never think about it again.
So anyway, not long ago I went searching for a way to disable it system-wide (since KDE on X11 doesn’t offer any toggle for it, at least for me) and the best solution I found is this little program that clears the middle-click selection clipboard any time you middle click so you never paste anything. Works like a charm for me.
https://github.com/milaq/XMousePasteBlockNot mentioned in the OP is that both discussions include a setting to enable middle mouse button paste for those who want it; it will just be off by default. Everyone calm down.
Is in bugtracker or in mr? If not please link.
Linked from the Linuxiac post:
Mozilla’s Phabricator revision D277804
The proposed change just stops setting middlemouse.paste to true by default, and there are comments suggesting tying it to GTK’s corresponding preference.
GNOME merge request: Disable primary-paste by default
People that know about this functionality and really love this functionality can easily override the setting.
gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface gtk-enable-primary-paste true
TBH, I’ve seen this cause more confusion in people than being considered helpful. Ctrl+V/Cmd+V are universally understood and behave predictably. Middle mouse click not so much. (Did you know there are two clipboards on Linux and MMB only pastes from one of them?)
I actually did not know there are two clipboards. Why/how do they work?
They’re called “selections”, the main ones being
PRIMARYandCLIPBOARD, and it’s effectively a form of IPC mediated by X. When you select something, that goes into thePRIMARYselection, while when you copy something, it goes into bothPRIMARYandCLIPBOARD.The problem is that “middle mouse click” isn’t actually paste, it’s “insert primary selection”. As long as they’re in sync you won’t notice any issue (Ctrl+V and MMB will both insert the same content), as soon as they’re out of sync you’re suddenly exposed to an implementation detail of the X11 protocol.
And it’s easy to go out of sync, simply copy something and then select unrelated text, now Ctrl+V and MMB will output different things. It can be useful, e.g. if you’re having to copy a bunch of different pieces of text from one window to another, you can simply select and MMB, no keyboard needed, but it’s not intuitive IMO, and conflicts with modern usage of the middle mouse button (Get it wrong when trying to open a link in a new tab and you’ll dump whatever text you last selected into the site instantly)
Also, these selections aren’t a thing under Wayland, it’s been re-implemented as a normal paste operation there. The question is actually whether the middle mouse button should be treated like any other mouse button or have this special behaviour by default. My vote is to expose it via the mouse settings applet and leave it up to users, like any other special mouse button.
You select the text and it magically is in this second (or actually first) clipboard. I have a habit of selecting the text I’m reading, so this selection is always something, and sometimes contains sensitive data. There were countless of situations when I was composing a long message, scrolling it and accidentally, not even noticing (it’s long already), pasted the contents. I hate this ‘feature’ and in general don’t understand who wants it and why. Disabling it would be a huge improvement for everyone, as those who need it usually know they need it, so there’s no difficulty in enabling it back.
but it’s quite intuitive to realize what it does
it isn’t if you’ve copied from an empty field by accident, or if your clipboard is empty.
interesting; how does one copy from an empty field by accidnet? /geniunely curious and oblivious
Since copy on highlight is default you literally just have to accidentally drag your mouse cursor in a terminal window and boom, you’ve copied empty text. It’s incredibly annoying.
ah i have had that happen before lol. it does copy spaces but it doesn’t overwrite your main clipboard so i don’t have qualms about it. every app you’d expect to support middle-mouse drag except notepad/gedit/kwrite/etc supports it instead of pasting unless you use chromium without the relevant extension or remain static over a textbox.
There are two clipboards in X11 - but MMB pastes from the selection not the clipboard. I have never heard of the other clipboard being used for anything and I first heard of this more than 30 years ago. (I don’t know what wayland does about clipboards, butiit acts live X11)
A few years ago when I tried switching, this drove me nuts. It’s so unintuitive coming from Windows where I use middle mouse all the time in browsers.
What does it do in windows, when you use it in a text field? I use this for pasting selected text from the terminal all the time, so i am quite fond of the current behaviour.
In VSCode, for instance, the middle mouse button adds extra cursors. Which is very annoying if it also pastes.
I use Ctrl+Shift+Arrow Up/Down for multiple cursors. Maybe because I’m already long time Linux user and use MMB to paste selected text.
I’m pretty sure people who use MMB do know that it uses one of the two clipboards in Linux. Hence the reason they use it.
That being said, I find baffling that they are not setting this as an optional feature but just outright disabling it.
They are setting this as an optional feature. They are not just disabling it.
Not true, if there is no user visible setting for it. Changing a hidden gsetting via a command line is essentially removing it since it will likely bitrot and then be fully removed in a few years.
It is currently a hidden setting in Firefox’s about:config. They are removing it from there and no longer controlling it within Firefox itself so it will follow the setting set in you window manager (probably have the wrong term here, haven’t had my coffee yet), which is (generally) not hidden and available through a settings GUI. So you won’t have a web browser having different functionality than elsewhere on your machine.
If it’s hidden at that point, blame the window manager/desktop environment/whatever it’s called.
Okay. I could spend hours and hours criticising GNOME for a lot of things, but this is not one of them. It is not removing functionality, as the article implies; as others here highlighted, it’s simply changing a default. That’s completely fine.
No default gnome app will be able to toggle that default. You can hack it in gsettings.
And worse, the fact there is a setting means that only the default will be tested. The feature will slowly but surely bitrot. In a few years we’ll see a proposal to remove it entirely. This is how software development works.
This article is dogshit. Its clearly written to make it sound like theyre completely getting rid of it to get people pissed off at GNOME and Mozilla. The GNOME merge request has “by default” in the title, so its pretty damn obvious they’re not getting rid of it completely.
As I explained elsewhere there is no official app to change this setting. Users can hack their gsettings.
Support for middle-paste will slowly but surely bitrot and eventually be removed.
They explicitly mention the plan to add a toggle in gnome settings in the merge request.
As I explained elsewhere there is no official app to change this setting
You’re skipping a step here, first a decision needs to be made on whether or not the default will change, then and only then can they decide whether it’s worth adding something like a toggle to the mouse settings panel, which would be trivial btw.
Configuration UI can be added regardless of what happens with defaults. Defaults change is not a blocker for exposing configurability. If anything I’d say you got it backwards: Don’t switch long-standing defaults until there is a discoverable and accessible way to change it.
They’re still doing something bad: changing the status quo. They’re turning our system into something different because new users want it to be like another system. Maybe they ought to use that other system instead? Or mac os which is kind of a hybrid concept.
Are we going to have to endure the mess of directories they get to enjoy in windows as well so users don’t feel lost? What other convenience should we forfeit and hide at the bottom of a menu because it frigtens the noobs?
Linux isn’t windows, it’s different, things are different, learn something different, or use something else.
They’re still doing something bad: changing the status quo.
I’ll be the nitpicker and point out that changing the status quo doesn’t necessarily need to be a bad thing. Every good thing ever has basically been a change from the status quo. 🤷♂️
Well, true, that was probably poorly worded.
Perhaps a bit. But I agree with your sentiment besides that. Hopefully we won’t have “the year of the Linux Desktop” as some sort of hard ambition, where we will reach a point where every OS just conforms and converges to the same paradigms, like we basically have on our phones by now.
Idk how you could look at GNOME and say its trying to act more like Windows. They have their own particular idea of what a desktop should be, and that might not include middle mouse pasting. Defaults shouldnt stay the default just because they’ve always been. Devs should be able to have discussions about changing things without people accusing them of trying to destroy Linux.
Edit: I also want to point out that a huge number of Linux users dont even know this is a feature (some of which you can see in this thread). This change will add an entry in the settings for it, which very well might lead to MORE people using it. I think disabled is the correct default for something as potentially dangerous as dumping your most recently highlighted text.
What’s with all the complaints here?
New users expect middle click to bring up an auto-scroll widget instead of pasting by default.
You can set up your computer how ever you want.
Want auto-scroll? Set it to auto-scroll.
Want paste? Set it to paste.
The first thing you do on a new system is set up the computer how you want.
No one’s taking anything away from you.
agreed. and middle click being paste has to be one of the stupidest defaults. I understand people use it, and whatever, everyone has their own workflow, but now middle click to drag doesn’t work and you’ve confused everyone since now it’s different everywhere.
Finally! Middle click paste annoyed me so much when I first started using Linux, it should not be on by default imo.
Wait… middle mouse button pastes? I’ve been using Linux for two years and that is news to me. To be honest, that sounds like more trouble than it’s worth to be on by default. Maybe just make it an option.
I find it very useful, and it conflicts with normal copy paste very rarely. There are two clipboards, one is filled with latest highlighted, and the other with latest Ctrl+C:ed. Middle click pastes from the first, Ctrl+V from the second. This makes you able to copy two things at once: ctrl+c something first, highlight something else second, paste in any order. The confusing thing when learing to use it for me was that since I need to highlight to ctrl+c, I will overwrite what is in the middle click clipboard, and it also means you cannot highlight something to replace it with whats in your middle click clipboard. It does however mean that most times you want to do a ctrl+c/ctrl+v both clipboards are in sync. Not sure why, but I often find myself having to copy/paste two things at once, and I use both buffers without thinking. Which makes it impossible to use macos.
Depends on the distribution and the defaults, but yeah it’s decently common for middle click to paste. I’d no idea Mozilla doesn’t respect the OS setting for this though, because I can’t recall ever turning it off in any of the browsers I use, but that could be because the forks are more sensible than Firefox itself.
In GNOME you have to modify a gsetting, or use something like GNOME Tweaks to disable it. Which is ridiculous, it should really just be under
Accessibility > Pointing And Clicking
I think GNOME is trying hard to overturn the idea that Linux has a rather bad layman user-experience, and part of that is the assumption that a layman doesn’t want too many options because it gets confusing. As a UI/UX person I definitely get this, but as I always argue with the head UX guy at my workplace, we’re not necessarily dealing just with laymen, but people who use our software as everyday tools and they’ll want the options to customise things to their liking.
Some extra toggles won’t change that. Hell you can hide it behind an “advanced mode” toggle even. Google does that with their idiotic “tap build number umpteen times to enable developer tools.”
They are making it an option
Mozilla and Gnome
What the fuck guys. Are you for real?This is what you spend your time on?
Gnome also spends time making posts bashing on developers who create alternative DEs, and mozilla also spends time thinking about how to put more ai in firefox
System76 spent their time spreading slander about Gnome and being shitty to upstream, just FYI
That’s good to know. So far I haven’t seen the opposite, but maybe the gnome post got more attention because they’re more popular.
The fact that you are downvoted only shows that the slander sadly works.
One dev without any go-ahead from Gnome did.
And let’s not forget System76 employees, as well as System76 themselves, have done the exact same thing.
I rechecked it, and, indeed, it’s from a single dev. The fact that it was from blogs.gnome.org made me think it was a publication in the name of all the gnome foundation
Can I just say what the fuck?
Was just talking to another Linux user about a week or so ago about how useful the middle click paste is. I’ll be pissed if I ever do a new install and have to figure out how to make the thing work the way it always has in the past.
You’re gonna have to tick a checkbox. The pain
It’s a travesty it’s a solely X11 thing and that it wasn’t adopted by other operating systems. Back in the day when I was doing a back office job one of the main apps ran on Solaris via what looked like some weird X11 to Windows forwarding app. Clipboard was shared between host and remote app so it was very obvious to see how much of a productivity gain middle-click paste was. Regretfully that’s the only app they managed to retire since I left. Mainframe one is still going strong.
Middle mouse paste was great on true 3 button mice. It became a liability with the invention of the mouse wheel, which made it a total crapshoot to try to click that damn button without rolling the wheel at the same time. It’s a classic case of overloaded functionality.
Like imagine if cars put the accelerator into the steering wheel, so you had to press the steering wheel down to accelerate. Everyone would hate it and it would be a safety nightmare. We put up with things on computers that we never would in other areas of life.
I can’t remember ever having an issue with the middle button also being the wheel.
I can’t remember the last time I’ve ever wanted to click the middle mouse button. The experience of having done so once or twice was bad enough to get me to rebind the action to something else.
Middle mouse button opens links in a new tab is most browsers. I use it constantly.
It’s used in lots of games.
In autocad middle mouse is used to pan around the screen, I use it constantly there as well.
Ahhh. I use command-click to open in new tabs.
I haven’t played a game that uses the mouse in several years. I mostly play Roguelikes such as NetHack, DCSS, or Caves of Qud using keyboard controls only, or console games with a controller.
I have never used a CAD program though sometimes I’ve thought about it.
It’s so interesting how different people’s approaches are to doing just about everything. Keeps things interesting, I guess. I still don’t get the wheel/middle-button issue. Unless it’s my using cheap as hell mouses that aren’t super sensitive. I’m not even talking about using the middle wheel the correct way (😇) but even remapped to something else, I’ve never had that issue.
Nowadays I use a trackpad for almost everything. I do use a mouse at work but then I mostly use keyboard shortcuts for everything I can (Excel really flies when you know some keyboard shortcuts).
This is why I buy 3-button mice. A wheel is too fiddly to be a suitable replacement.
For example:
For many people this is a non-issue. I think this a case of just accepting we are different and don’t need to force our view on everyone else.
Maybe 15 years ago I had a mouse with a tilting scroll wheel (for side scrolling), on that one I did have issues with middle click, for about a month until I got used to clicking straight down.
So maybe it is just a question of practice? Maybe not. But since both options exist there is no need to get upset.
Did you mean to reply to someone else?
Because your comment makes no sense as a response to what I wrote.
Whats next, removing Ctrl+Insert/Shift+Delete/Shift+Insert as its confusing that we have two different ways to use the clipboard?
Gnome is all about
limitingstreamlining the experience!
Want a nice project to spend your resources on? Try working on a PDF viewer that supports verifying signatures, form filling and signing documents.
Stop fucking around with meaningless issues.
Yes, let’s keep taking features away. 🙄
This is actually an accessibility issue. It’s often much easier for me to use middle click paste than other copy and paste methods. But as always those numbnuts just think about streamlining everything.
Making a feature optional is not taking it away
But if it off by default, it’s going to slowly rot and then they’ll just remove it altogether.
GNOME has plenty of features that are off by default and still exist. The merge request also mentions that redhat would 100% recieve complaints from paying customers if it was removed. Theyre very clearly aware that people still want this feature. You’re just assuming the worst.
It is, but slower.
There should be real hotkey editing in the settings or it should respect the OS hotkey settings. As of now the only way to toggle this is by diving into about config and finding the flag.
Would solve other problems too, like ctrl+pgup/down swapping tabs, but it also is used for things like changing spreadsheet tabs.
