Making something not the default then removing it because it isn’t widely used (because it’s now disabled by default and users have to know it exists and then turn it on) is the gnome way.
Make no mistake, they’re trying to remove features they don’t like. There are lots of people involved in free software because they didn’t get to be in control of nonfree software.
Gotta make everything into a conspiracy theory huh?
https://piefed.social/comment/9549428 They don’t want to disable it, just not make it on by default.
As a new migrating user looking to escape Bill Gates bullshit middle click paste was really confusing as I wanted middle click to remain consistent with screen panning, like panning a camera in blender or panning a canvas in gimp. Had to run through a few guides to disable middle click paste. I was surprised there wasn’t an option to enable/disable globally. Having an option will help other noobs like myself ditch Mac/windows for Linux and maintaining a familiar workflow.
I have long found it more useful what the middle mouse button does on Windows (start scrolling) and hope that becomes widely adopted, even outside browsers, on Linux one day too. Good step in that direction.
What? No way. I despise their captive scrolling stuff. Every time I get forced onto a windows system I forget that middle mouse is a weird scrolling mode and end up wandering randomly up and down pages until I realize what happened.
Damn I’m using that I hope they don’t remove it!
Finally!
Former Mac user here: Middle click should expose all windows, as the good lord intended.
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.
But why? Then the users thinks “huh, weird” and goes on.
I’ve seen that countless times with people that are less technical.
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.
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.
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
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Mozilla are still using Phabricator?! That stopped being maintained in 2021…
TIL middle mouse paste.
It’d be so easy for them to just add “by default” to the end of the title.
Would they kindly discuss using Super+C and Super+V for copy paste instead ? It’s the only thing I miss from macOS.
You can add shortcuts yourself in gnome, no ?
Yes but that doesn’t always translate to every program. But also, I use Plasma anyway x)
If you add the shortcut at the DE level it definitely should work in every program. Idk if Gnome actually let’s you bind copy and paste though.
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 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.
It already is configurable, theyre just defaulting it to off. You will be able to turn it back on.
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.
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.
next they will remove the copy history?
When was that ever a thing?
Looks like Gnome needs an external clipboard, I thought it was just part of most linux WM. shows what 25 years can teach you if you you never venture out too far.
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
Well fuck me. That’s kinda neat.
Shame it doesn’t subsequently work with ctrl+v, because that would be even cooler.
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…)
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.
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.
My god, you just blowed my mind!
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
