I can’t tell you how many times I’ve accidentally pasted random private stuff from that goddamn middle click into WEB PAGES! Things that can read whatever text you type without having to explicitly submit anything. It’s a horrible thing for a new user to discover by accident. It’s such an unexpected feature to new users, and no one gets told about it, ever. You simply discover it by accident.
This is a good change, not having it on by default.
To all the haters of this idea, god forbid we make Linux less weird by default for people migrating from Windows.
All that said, I have learned to love select-to-copy and middle-click paste. Especially in the terminal.
Until this article I didn’t even know you could middle-click paste.
I’ve done it countless times by mistake in Discord when trying to scroll through a channel…
This. Only correct comment in the entire thread. Rest are people who probably don’t even use computers and have no idea what a mouse is.
And that is the exact reason that was given in the gnome merge request. A user being able to accidentally paste a bunch of text they didnt even know they’d copied incredibly design.
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.
Don’t you touch my middle paste!
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
https://piefed.social/comment/9549428 They don’t want to disable it, just not make it on by default.
It would be fucking GNOME
Please don’t fuck a gnome, that’s very impolite
The essence of the article:
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 functionality will be there and can be enabled. The reasoning:
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.
To have it as ab option, great. I believe KDE already has this? Computers should work the way the user wants it, so a middle click should do what the user wants it to do.
Removing it completely would be insanity
But why? Then the users thinks “huh, weird” and goes on.
I’ve seen that countless times with people that are less technical.
I don’t understand what the problem here is. But why the option exists? If someone does not care, then why would someone have any say in such an option? You can’t enforce people to care.
It’s very easy for a user to accidentally paste private or sensitive information somewhere dangerous if theyre unaware of this feature.
The FreeDesktop specification refers to this feature as an “easter egg”, and something like this should absolutely not be an easter egg.
This change would mean disabling it by default and adding a settings entry that actually explains it, making sure users are informed before they can accidentally use it.
Then that could be solved by displaying a message the first time GNOME is launched, not by disabling it. This will just break workflows for quite a lot of people.
It will break their workflow for a few seconds before they change the setting back. Or they could read the changes before installing a major update and change it before even doing anything.
Maybe in the future it will be added to the initial setup guide along with stuff like choosing if you want mouse acceleration, but I really dont think its that big a deal.
“read the changes before installing a major update”
As if people have the time to read the changelogs for every single package all the time… 🙄
This is pretty important on a server to avoid disruptions and outages, but people have other things to do.
And once it is no longer on and has become a setting, they can just remove the setting and force people to drop gsettings and then remove it completely.
They could also instead ask people on first launch. Some people enable telemetry, so they will find out how many people prefer to keep it, which I bet will be most.
“read the changes before installing a major update”
Obviously I dont think people need to read every change log for every piece of software. I do think its a good idea to read the release notes for a major update of your DE thought, since its the piece of software that is going to effect you the most.
And once it is no longer on and has become a setting, they can just remove the setting and force people to drop gsettings and then remove it completely.
What reason do they possibly have to do this? The setting already exists and is feature complete. It doesnt require maintenance. They also noted in the merge request that many RHEL users use it, so RedHat has a financial incentive not to remove it.
They could also instead ask people on first launch. Some people enable telemetry, so they will find out how many people prefer to keep it, which I bet will be most.
They could also just make it a setting. I really dont think it makes a big difference. They can also still use telemetry to see how many users enable it. Based on this thread, I really doubt it will be most.
The first time startup wizard should be kept relatively short and minimal. This just seems like a very unnecessary thing to include.
Damn I’m using that I hope they don’t remove it!
good (also they’re proposing a toggle that’s off by default)
Toggle is the nicest way to go for any feature that has stayed for a long time and has a dedicated user base.
But why? It hurts noone to have that enabled.
It will hurt less being disabled
Sure, if you grew with that feature and use it, it doesn’t hurt you. For others though, this is pain, it fucking hurts to keep accidentally paste stuff all over due to a legacy feature.
I’ve literally used Linux for over 5 years without ever noticing middle click did anything unusual until a colleagues showed me he could magically paste things with the mouse and I had to ask how he did it. Now I use it frequently and love the feature. I just don’t understand how you “keep accidentally paste stuff all over” when I’ve never heard any of my Linux friends and colleges ever mention anything about it and like me they were supprised and happy when I showed them the feature as well.
Accidental paste mostly happens to me on my multi monitor setup where a window use MMB for other stuff like panning and I accidentally move on another screen.
Post literally describes who and how it hurts. You need to read.
I did read it. I still do t understandthe issues. Most normal people do to my knowledge not even know they can middle click. And on most laptops three finger middle click is usually disabled by default. Having issues with “confusion” is to me a made up problem.
If you’ve never accidentally pressed the mouse wheel while using your mouse you must just not use computers very much, especially not for work
I dont belive that your argument adds much to the discussion.
I don’t believe ur mom adds much to the discussion xD
I like my middle paste, so long as it isn’t gone for good I’m happy. Having 2 clipboards is also nice
I might switch away from GNOME if this passes. I’ve lost enough QoL features/UI degradations already with no option to go back.
They only discuss to disable it by default, not removing the functionality.
That’s at least an improvement, I didn’t think GNOME had it in them to add more user-defined options.
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.
There’s nothing to discuss. Just disable that shit already.
Fucking finally
I hope everyone else follows soon. If you like it when you are trying to open a link on a new tab and your system randomly decides to spew a selection from another app into a random text box you are free to configure that yourself. Remember to configure in a cilice wrapping your thigh while you are at it, it’s unix-compliant and has been around for centuries.
