It’d be so easy for them to just add “by default” to the end of the title.
i dont understand why this is a conversation. shouldnt we just have the option to turn it on and off?
The option is there, the news is that GNOME changed the default value.
ah ok. thanks
From time to time I have to be reminded that this exists.
It can be re-enabled with the following command (source is the Merge Request linked in the article):
gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface gtk-enable-primary-paste true
Can imagine some distros will override the GNOME default here.
I use middle click paste all the time, but the title is misleading and clickbaity. At least on GNOME’s side they’re discussing about disabling it by default, not completely. While this is annoying as long as the setting isn’t going away I’m fine with that and I understand the reasoning behind it.
Reminds me of LWN and the end of the Rust experiment.
Highlight->Middle paste has been my friend for decades now. Using it from SunOS in the 90-s to now has been a great feature. It’s the quickest way to copy and paste while I’m working fast with text or data entry.
I love having both clipboards be functional. The latest rounds of tools that have stopped being as compatible with it has been no end of problems in my workflow. I’ll copy with the keyboard, highlight some text and then paste both clipboards somewhere else.
No, using the keyboard here isn’t as fast, don’t bother making that argument, especially since ctrl-c means different things in different places on Unix style systems. Left hand stays home row while the right is forced to leave for the mouse since it’s a GUI.
I’ve had to deal with many tools that don’t respect keyboard cut/paste as well. Add in that some tools like putty or git bash on windows have ctrl-ins for paste?
Panning in CAD/design is usually click and hold middle or even a two button system (freecad), so trying to take a middle click for that isn’t buying uniformity.
The copy/paste world is already fractured enough. Keep the highlight/middle click working so we can go fast. I might be a dinosaur, but I’m a fast dinosaur.
reading these comments had me wondering if i was the only dinosaur around. lol
That’s the real linux user story.
We come for the speed, flexibility, FOSS values … but we STAY for the middle mouse paste.
I like my middle paste, so long as it isn’t gone for good I’m happy. Having 2 clipboards is also nice
Why is this a thing? I’ve never wanted a feature less…
Because it is awesome. So useful, and fast.
Middle paste, like many features, can be used to increase productivity. It’s normal. A better question would be why doesn’t Windows have it? It makes no sense to dumb down Linux to the level of Windows, just when people are leaving Windows because the user experience is so bad. Sure, make it an option in Settings. So people can continue to use it if they want. But there are many things worth utilising to save clicks on both Windows and Linux. Get to know them, if you want to get on with things.
People can’t and won’t use it because it sucks. Middle mouse click is for two things:
- open in a new tab
- scroll/pan
See how they’re both navigation related? Because the mouse is a navigation tool, not a text tool.
A keyboard is a text tool, all pasting should reside on the keyboard. Eagle-eyed readers may notice that there are actually letters on all the buttons they keep mashing at random, those letters are a hint that the keyboard may be used for text-related operations.
Windows sucks now, but it won desktops for a very good reason initially and as Linux is making inroads into personal computing, there are no reasons it can’t learn lessons from why that was the case.
Old Linux GUIs suck and the user experience in general absolutely sucks on anything before Debian 8. Gnome classic was nuked because it sucked, and new Gnome was an improvement in every way, and it was only very recently that KDE got to a similar level of polish.
No one is saying the feature should be completely removed, just like KDE’s insane defaults of “Peek at desktop” in the bottom right instead of “minimize all windows”, it just needs to be hidden somewhere because 99% of users don’t expect a computer to work this way and with good reason.
Leave the legacy toggle in for people who cut their teeth on OSes made by companies that went bankrupt shortly after making them and expect all computers to work like that until the end of time.
Heck - just for them, create a separate clipboard that always holds the user’s nudes and dedicate left mouse click to a shortcut that emails them to their dad for all I care, because it’s how it worked on a random hack of AmigaOS they used in the 1800s, I don’t care, just leave us out of it.
I discovered this feature on my 1st Linux distro in early 2000s, was like “Huh, that’s interesting” then tried Ctrl+V, and then adopted both into my daily workflow. Whenever Bitwarden autofill doesn’t work or unavailable by the site security settings, I copy my pass into the clipboard and select my username and paste both in a single action
This is one of the most useful things in Xorg, and prior to that in X11. If you (generic you, not anyone in particular here) don’t know about it it’s because you come from too long time on “my users are stupid” operating systems. It’s one of those things that once you have it in muscle memory you use it without even thinking about it.
Have I mis-pasted things? Yes. Have l pasted my password in an IRC channel? Yes. Would I stop using it because once every few months I make a mistake? Not at all.
Make it configurable, if you must, but leave us old timers work the way we have done for 30 years or more. There are already some software/ toolkits that disable it, so it is likely doable on a per-app basis.
Gratuitous “old man yells at clouds” rant: people should be forced to use a VT52 for one year before being granted GUI privileges, especially if you work with network hardware.
I’ll crawl back in my cave now.
It already is configurable, theyre just defaulting it to off. You will be able to turn it back on.
It seems to me that having a mouse button defaultly paste the contents of the keyboard without the inclusion of a modifier key is just a bad idea.
As you said, you have pasted the wrong thing by accident because it’s one button press.
It just seems to me that by default pasting text should not be done by a single button press anywhere where your hand rests, like a mouse or the center of a keyboard. I’m not saying people shouldn’t be able to make it’s a configurable option, options are good, but it is not a good default.
This is one of the most useful things in Xorg, and prior to that in X11.
X11 is the last version of Xorg, not sure what you meant there.
Make it configurable, if you must, but leave us old timers work the way we have done for 30 years or more.
It was configurable and will stay configurable. The intent is to change the default.
Personally I support the change, but that might be because of my adhd making me click on the mouse wheel every 0.1 seconds.
X11 is a protocol that Xorg implements
It’s been some time… Before Xorg there was Xfree86, and before that the various implementations by the other Unix vendors. Does that make sense?
Yeah, I just had some misconceptions Xorg and X11. A few googling sessions later I’m all caught up though, I think.
Thank you for pointing that out in a calm way, on the internet.
Damn I’m using that I hope they don’t remove it!
I occasionally use middle mouse paste, but I switched my partner over from Windows recently and they were used to scrolling by holding MMB and dragging which seems to be the default on Windows…
I expected there to be a toggle to turn off middle mouse paste but there just wasn’t. I had to go into multiple different places to disable it and enable autoscroll for all their apps. I ended up installing a hacky tool that would just clear the clipboard whenever MMB was pressed.
If anything can make this process easier, I’m all for it.
TIL middle mouse paste.
I don’t understand how one can accidentally paste with the middle-click, but I can see in this thread that it happens. I was very much against this change but now I need to see stats. Are there any?
I use a lot of graphics programs which use middle click drag to pan around. Figma for example constantly pastes whatever random text I forgot is in my clipboard
Happens all the time.
Fun thing is that I didn’t even know that existed.
Then I tell you something that might either blow your mind or be useful in future (or just being fun fact):
On Linux there is the regular copy/paste clipboard, which you already know how it works. But then there is this primary clipboard called primary selection too, that is independent from normal clipboard. Text will be copied to primary selection when you select a text (in example in Firefox). Just by selection the text with the mouse is enough and it will not affect the normal clipboard. Then you can middle click the text from primary clipboard.
Read more here: https://tronche.com/gui/x/icccm/sec-2.html#s-2.6.1
It’s cool, but I cannot count the amount of times I was confused by that and accidentally pasted after switching, I would be glad if it became configurable.
It’s actually surprising that this is not configurable already. At least in a GUI.
The reaction that I see here explains why, I guess.
Well fuck me. That’s kinda neat.
Shame it doesn’t subsequently work with ctrl+v, because that would be even cooler.
Once you’re used to it, you can use the two separate clipboards independently. Say you wrote a sentence like, “one two five four three”, you can correct it by selecting “three”, cutting with Ctrl-X, then selecting “five” (meaning it is now in the selection buffer), hitting Ctrl-V to paste “three” from the clipboard, and then finally middle-click where you need to paste the “five”.
on some apps; it works with ctrl-shift-v. so ctrl-v for the clipboard, and ctrl-shift-v for the cut buffer.
I guess one could create shortcuts to a tool like
wl-copyandwl-pasteto either copy or paste content to primary selection (or regular clipboard for that matter). So in that case a simple script could run the command and in your desktop environment you setup a shortcut to run the script.Yes its hacky, but in Linux nothing is impossible. :-) (unless it is…)
In most programs, you can paste the primary selection with Shift+Insert
My god, you just blowed my mind!
