A long-standing Linux behavior is under threat as GNOME and Mozilla review a proposal to disable middle-mouse paste.

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.

  • MercuryGenisus@lemmy.world
    223·
    3 days ago

    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.

    • mumblerfish@lemmy.world
      16·
      3 days ago

      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.

    • Leon@pawb.socialEnglish
      9·
      3 days ago

      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.”