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GNOME and Mozilla Discuss Proposal to Disable Middle Mouse Paste on Linux (linuxiac.com)
submitted 7 months ago by to c/linux@programming.dev
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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.

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[–] 2 points 7 months ago (1 child)

I'm pretty sure people who use MMB do know that it uses one of the two clipboards in Linux. Hence the reason they use it.

That being said, I find baffling that they are not setting this as an optional feature but just outright disabling it.

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  • [–] 24 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    They are setting this as an optional feature. They are not just disabling it.

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  • [–] -1 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    Not true, if there is no user visible setting for it. Changing a hidden gsetting via a command line is essentially removing it since it will likely bitrot and then be fully removed in a few years.

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  • [–] 3 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    It is currently a hidden setting in Firefox's about:config. They are removing it from there and no longer controlling it within Firefox itself so it will follow the setting set in you window manager (probably have the wrong term here, haven't had my coffee yet), which is (generally) not hidden and available through a settings GUI. So you won't have a web browser having different functionality than elsewhere on your machine.

    If it's hidden at that point, blame the window manager/desktop environment/whatever it's called.

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  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago (1 child)

    I don't use Gnome, but they hate to expose settings in general it seems and like to dumb down everything (and that is why I don't use it). The issue here is that the you need KDE, Sway, Niri, Xfce, etc all to implement a setting for this. Middle mouse paste is useful and has been standard on Unix-likes for decades. There is literally no reason to remove it.

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