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 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/XMousePasteBlock