Calling it a ‘dumpster fire’ is a bit dramatic.
I think I’d happily describe the multiple clipboard situation in Linux as a dumpster fire…
It’s awkwardly ‘solved’ by clipboard managers merging clipboards but it’s still wonky. Even for somebody who has been using Linux as a desktop for many years I occasionally find myself annoyed by it.
At this point I think I’d prefer “copy” to be an affirmative action rather than something that is done automatically. It makes pasting over existing text much easier.
Yeah the 2 clipboards are a mess.
I actually once locked me out of ALL my accounts because of them.
Middle click paste sucks, I keep accideE&4nry!NAnY6Yfntally activating it in the middle of my documents which is bad when I have st6SFMzZkTR7!b^yuff like passwords copied and don’t notice, so good
No hunter2 in there, this is fake.
KDE and Gnome already have toggles for it, though Gnome’s is in gnome-tweaks because Gnome hates exposed settings.
I’d support unifying behavior between toolkits and apps to provide users with a single point to set their preference, but I use this feature a hundred times a day. I’d also like it to remain the default; *nix desktops should have their own flavor instead of just copying Mac OS or Windows, and middle-click paste has been a part of that flavor for 40 years.
I use this DAILY!
I do too but it’s usually unintentional
HOW? In what manner of mouse using are you accidently clicking the paste button?
Two finger scroll on my touchpad and another finger lightly presses it turning it into a middle click paste
That’s interesting. It never does that with my touchpad. I wish it did though.
What desktop environment?
Niri, I think Hyprland did also
Ill be very happy when that day comes. Its one of the first things I need to search for how to disable every time i setup a new machine. To me, middle click has always been panning a canvas, and rectangle selecting text in editors. Its always super jarring having it paste text on new gnome machines
wait where does that get overridden? its going back a few years but when I was trying blender I used middle click paste and I don’t think I had any issues with it affecting whatever middle click does by default in blender
TIL: middle click is paste?
TIL why that exists and how it works after using Linux for five years. I always wondered why someone put a function like pasting but not also copying text on the mouse and never realised you just have to select it since apparently there is a second clipboard. I wouldn’t miss it but it also wasn’t that big of a problem.
It’s one of those things you either use constantly or not at all. Activating the feature intentionally and having it fail is irritating, but activating it unintentionally because you didn’t know it was there could have serious consequences. I mean, I can even come up with cases where the wrong information being C&P’d accidentally into the wrong Web form could result in someone ending up dead.
Given the difference in stakes, “off by default” makes sense for this feature. I wouldn’t call it a dumpster fire, though—more like a relic of a more innocent time.
No, secondary clipboard Ctrl+v paste is a Windowsism
I never used it, but TIL…
I’m just lost why it’s so hard baked into x11 instead of configurable. I don’t want middle click to paste my selections. Yes I know x11 has some history and that it’s a feature, I do not like that feature. I will never like that feature. I want to copy manually and paste manually.
I don’t want my selections to be captured in a buffer.
Not once in over 20 years of daily Firefox usage have I used this feature.
Not having that in Windows is jarring.
I don’t use GNOME or Firefox though so maybe who cares.
If that’s not optional, I’d have to leave Firefox for something else.
As someone who likes the middle-click to do mouse relative scrolling, I would be OK with this being configurable on a per-application level.
I don’t think it really makes sense as a “standard”. Blender will never use middle click as paste, for example.
Middle click to paste the X PRIMARY selection predates Blender.
Yes, I do know how old Blender is.
Right,
But just because it was a standard doesn’t mean it made sense as a standard. So when 99% of applications don’t care to adopt the standard, it really only makes sense to let the application space decide what to do with middle click and to fall back on the user’s system configuration if it’s unspecified (which can still be paste if you want it to be imo)
If 99% of applications that run on *nix desktops didn’t want to accept middle-click to paste text where that’s an operation that makes sense, I would agree with you. I do not believe that to be the case.
On the one hand, I’m all for having it configurable per app. But there should also be a global default, so that one doesn’t need to set it for each program. The current proposal sounds as if I would need to activate it once in the compositor (Gnome) and then separately in Firefox. It should probably be centrally handled by the compositor (not sure if this is possible, don’t know how primary selection works on Wayland).
And the keyboard shortcut for primary clipboard paste (
Shift+Ins) is already gone from gtk.- https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/352 (closed)
- https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1070518 (open)
- There’s a nice Q/A on stackexchange: “Why does Shift+Insert paste from CLIPBOARD in some applications and PRIMARY in others?”