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.
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.