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.

  • spartanatreyu@programming.dev
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    7 months ago

    What’s with all the complaints here?

    New users expect middle click to bring up an auto-scroll widget instead of pasting by default.

    You can set up your computer how ever you want.

    Want auto-scroll? Set it to auto-scroll.

    Want paste? Set it to paste.

    The first thing you do on a new system is set up the computer how you want.

    No one’s taking anything away from you.

    • tyler@programming.dev
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      7 months ago

      agreed. and middle click being paste has to be one of the stupidest defaults. I understand people use it, and whatever, everyone has their own workflow, but now middle click to drag doesn’t work and you’ve confused everyone since now it’s different everywhere.

  • priapus@piefed.social
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    7 months ago

    This article is dogshit. Its clearly written to make it sound like theyre completely getting rid of it to get people pissed off at GNOME and Mozilla. The GNOME merge request has “by default” in the title, so its pretty damn obvious they’re not getting rid of it completely.

    • kamstrup@programming.dev
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      7 months ago

      As I explained elsewhere there is no official app to change this setting. Users can hack their gsettings.

      Support for middle-paste will slowly but surely bitrot and eventually be removed.