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.
It’s a travesty it’s a solely X11 thing and that it wasn’t adopted by other operating systems. Back in the day when I was doing a back office job one of the main apps ran on Solaris via what looked like some weird X11 to Windows forwarding app. Clipboard was shared between host and remote app so it was very obvious to see how much of a productivity gain middle-click paste was. Regretfully that’s the only app they managed to retire since I left. Mainframe one is still going strong.
Middle mouse paste was great on true 3 button mice. It became a liability with the invention of the mouse wheel, which made it a total crapshoot to try to click that damn button without rolling the wheel at the same time. It’s a classic case of overloaded functionality.
Like imagine if cars put the accelerator into the steering wheel, so you had to press the steering wheel down to accelerate. Everyone would hate it and it would be a safety nightmare. We put up with things on computers that we never would in other areas of life.
I can’t remember ever having an issue with the middle button also being the wheel.
Some mouses have scroll wheels that click too easily. So when you scroll, you paste. In my collection of mouses the Logitech ones are fine, gaming mouses are the worst, and the one Microsoft mouse has no way to do a middle click
I can’t remember the last time I’ve ever wanted to click the middle mouse button. The experience of having done so once or twice was bad enough to get me to rebind the action to something else.
It’s so interesting how different people’s approaches are to doing just about everything. Keeps things interesting, I guess. I still don’t get the wheel/middle-button issue. Unless it’s my using cheap as hell mouses that aren’t super sensitive. I’m not even talking about using the middle wheel the correct way (😇) but even remapped to something else, I’ve never had that issue.
Nowadays I use a trackpad for almost everything. I do use a mouse at work but then I mostly use keyboard shortcuts for everything I can (Excel really flies when you know some keyboard shortcuts).
Middle mouse button opens links in a new tab is most browsers. I use it constantly.
It’s used in lots of games.
In autocad middle mouse is used to pan around the screen, I use it constantly there as well.
Ahhh. I use command-click to open in new tabs.
I haven’t played a game that uses the mouse in several years. I mostly play Roguelikes such as NetHack, DCSS, or Caves of Qud using keyboard controls only, or console games with a controller.
I have never used a CAD program though sometimes I’ve thought about it.