GNOME & Firefox Consider Disabling Middle Click Paste By Default: "An X11'ism...Dumpster Fire"
https://www.phoronix.com/news/GNOME-Firefox-MiddleClick-PasteOpen linkView original on lemmy.world171
Comments91https://www.phoronix.com/news/GNOME-Firefox-MiddleClick-PasteOpen linkView original on lemmy.world
Urgh, I use it at least 300 times a day.
From the other thread it seems it'll just be disabled by default, and enableable if wanted
Same, and I have done so since the mid-90's. It's muscle memory at this point.
From the other thread it seems it'll just be disabled by default, and enableable if wanted
Yeah, the title of this post seems to make that fairly clear. Still annoying though.
Maybe GNOME and Mozilla will consider a separate download/package where it is enabled by default, like gnome-desktop-middle-click-to-paste-enabled :D
never even knew that was a thing until a couple months ago, found it by accident. for 15-ish years I've just used a programmable mouse button for paste. still don't know what i should do with that button now since middle click can paste.
Welcome to the future! ... Or the past, not sure, but welcome.
Sure but youre probably aware that the vast majority of users dont, and for those users its a usability issue.
Calling it a 'dumpster fire' is a bit dramatic.
I think I'd happily describe the multiple clipboard situation in Linux as a dumpster fire...
It's awkwardly 'solved' by clipboard managers merging clipboards but it's still wonky. Even for somebody who has been using Linux as a desktop for many years I occasionally find myself annoyed by it.
At this point I think I'd prefer "copy" to be an affirmative action rather than something that is done automatically. It makes pasting over existing text much easier.
Yeah the 2 clipboards are a mess.
I actually once locked me out of ALL my accounts because of them.
Bravo Michael for continuing to farm bullshit drama with clickbait headlines on the most inane topics like "how my DE handles pasting text"
Does Gnome have a proper file picker yet?
You mean "once again". They had one, but screwed it up. Who the fuck types in the file save dialog expecting it to perform SEARCH?
Middle click paste sucks, I keep accideE&4nry!NAnY6Yfntally activating it in the middle of my documents which is bad when I have st6SFMzZkTR7!b^yuff like passwords copied and don't notice, so good
No hunter2 in there, this is fake.
KDE and Gnome already have toggles for it, though Gnome's is in gnome-tweaks because Gnome hates exposed settings.
I'd support unifying behavior between toolkits and apps to provide users with a single point to set their preference, but I use this feature a hundred times a day. I'd also like it to remain the default; *nix desktops should have their own flavor instead of just copying Mac OS or Windows, and middle-click paste has been a part of that flavor for 40 years.
Middle click paste is extremely useful. Why would anyone want to disable it?
It can conflict with some programs. A lot of modern design programs make use of middle click drags to move around a canvas.
That caused problems for me and it took me days to realize it was middle click paste causing the issue of all these random segments of text appearing all over the canvas.
It was also annoying to disable. I was using Chromium at the time and you simply cannot disable it, even by disabling it in Gnome. I had to use Firefox exclusively when using that design program since at least Firefox has a hidden option to disable it.
As a software developer working closely with designers this has caused some nightmare scenarios
There are programs that use the middle mouse button but also support pasting from clipboard. I've been annoyed at work plenty of times when I'm trying to translate across a canvas but accidentally paste a random node of text. Bonus points if it contains some kind of password that was still in your clipboard. I don't think it's a good default.
Sounds like your doing passwords wrong.
My mouse's middle click is easy to hit accidentally, and so I often paste stuff on accident, I just wish I could disable it. The "select to copy" doesn't work for me either, since I often absentmindedly select things while I'm reading.
As a software developer working closely with ux and designers I am forced to use tools such as figma and Miro. O can not tell how many times I have pasted sensitive shit into those work places because design software is mouse driven.
If you use a ThinkPad that has its track point designed around the assumption that middle click is used for scroll and only scroll, it will send you crazy. Thankfully KDE can disable it in most apps through a setting, but some apps keep on doing it anyway.
I use this DAILY!
I do too but it's usually unintentional
HOW? In what manner of mouse using are you accidently clicking the paste button?
Having a mouse button being over-sensitive or being used to another middle clic behavior like windows' autoscroll toggle will tend to do that. Having a fullscreen software using MMB for something else like panning and failling to fully capture the mouse on the current screen in a multi-monitor setup also.
Two finger scroll on my touchpad and another finger lightly presses it turning it into a middle click paste
That's interesting. It never does that with my touchpad. I wish it did though.
What desktop environment?
Niri, I think Hyprland did also
Ill be very happy when that day comes. Its one of the first things I need to search for how to disable every time i setup a new machine. To me, middle click has always been panning a canvas, and rectangle selecting text in editors. Its always super jarring having it paste text on new gnome machines
wait where does that get overridden? its going back a few years but when I was trying blender I used middle click paste and I don't think I had any issues with it affecting whatever middle click does by default in blender
For me it'his is one of the most useful features of Linux desktops and one of the main reasons I feel lost when I have to use Windows.
You won't lose it. They'll just turn it off by default for new users.
And soon new users will never know, as each great Linux feature becomes hidden until the default desktop is a awful as all the rest.
I've used Linux for five years now and always wondered who had the idea to put paste on the middle mouse button and thought it was just some obscure convention from the past since it didn't even paste what was in my clipboard. I never figured out that it was a different kind of paste where you just select text since it is never explained anywhere. I'd rather have new users not be put off by strange unexplained behavior.
Strange and unexpected?
When it doesn't that is strange and unexpected. It's relative.
This has been the Unix standard for 30 years implemented at MIT if I remember right.
Maybe a first use, explain, ask toggle. Instead of having to opt in.
They keep ruining Linux by dumbing it down!
Next thing you know we will be catering to mac users and all mouse buttons will do nothing.
As much as new windows users don't know about ctrl+c, alt+f4, win+d... Those who don't care won't learn, those who do, will, it's as simple as that.
They won't though, because they will never know.
I am not a fan of dumbing everything down and hiding all the good stuff.
Is there a big popup at startup with windows that I somehow missed with all the shortcuts? Or did linux became sudenly less documented overnight? Why wouldn't they know? Why do you think that users magicaly knows about shortcuts almost never referenced anywhere on windows but wouldn't know about one sparking a debate among linux users with a toggle in settings directly referencing it?
And then they'll remove the feature citing telemetry.
I can live with this one, as long as they let us pick the function
The default paste action is pretty much the only thing preventing anyone from picking a different function for the button. That's the the biggest reason for reversing the default behaviour.
Damn, the amount of comments that didn't even read the full... title... Is reading comprehension getting this bad? Middle clic paste isn't getting removed, just being opt-in rather than opt-out, yet a bunch of commenters are up in arms "time to ditch firefox"...
Half of them probably will. People are like that.
Many times, I have seen people switch tech because something is missing or has changed…and they switch to something that also does not have it. Boggles my mind.
On the other hand, the alternative they switch to may have other features that they like. If a particular option was what kept them using some program/DE/OS, why stay if it's gone?
Historically speaking, the gnome devs have made “disabled by default” the first step towards removing a feature everyone uses.
Historically speaking, from what I'm reading is that gnome devs have a history of bad decisions birthing forks here and there "fine, I'll do my own gnome, with blackjack and hookers" too, so I don't know how much weigh such a decision can have to be perfectly honnest.
Eh, gnome is the default on some of the biggest distributions in a time when apparently lots of people are trying Linux for the first time so there’s an outsized opportunity for their usual shenanigans to have consequences for the rest of us.
Which has happened a bunch of times in the past.
TIL: middle click is paste?
the middle click is "paste selection" not "paste clipboard". those are 2 different things under *nix.
I personally use this constantly because you need the funtionality to quickly copy some text somewhere so often, it makes much more sense to not have to do: Select text, ctrl-c, move mouse, click text field, ctrl-v. much nicer to just: select text, move mouse, press middle button.
Thanks for the explanation. Actually a really nice feature.
oh that's good
Not having that in Windows is jarring.
I don't use GNOME or Firefox though so maybe who cares.
No, secondary clipboard Ctrl+v paste is a Windowsism
I never used it, but TIL......
TIL why that exists and how it works after using Linux for five years. I always wondered why someone put a function like pasting but not also copying text on the mouse and never realised you just have to select it since apparently there is a second clipboard. I wouldn't miss it but it also wasn't that big of a problem.
It's one of those things you either use constantly or not at all. Activating the feature intentionally and having it fail is irritating, but activating it unintentionally because you didn't know it was there could have serious consequences. I mean, I can even come up with cases where the wrong information being C&P'd accidentally into the wrong Web form could result in someone ending up dead.
Given the difference in stakes, "off by default" makes sense for this feature. I wouldn't call it a dumpster fire, though—more like a relic of a more innocent time.
I'm just lost why it's so hard baked into x11 instead of configurable. I don't want middle click to paste my selections. Yes I know x11 has some history and that it's a feature, I do not like that feature. I will never like that feature. I want to copy manually and paste manually.
I don't want my selections to be captured in a buffer.
I like it, it's especially useful in a tty(tho many distros don't have it by default)
Not once in over 20 years of daily Firefox usage have I used this feature.
As someone who likes the middle-click to do mouse relative scrolling, I would be OK with this being configurable on a per-application level.
I don't think it really makes sense as a "standard". Blender will never use middle click as paste, for example.
Middle click to paste the X PRIMARY selection predates Blender.
Yes, I do know how old Blender is.
Right,
But just because it was a standard doesn't mean it made sense as a standard. So when 99% of applications don't care to adopt the standard, it really only makes sense to let the application space decide what to do with middle click and to fall back on the user's system configuration if it's unspecified (which can still be paste if you want it to be imo)
If 99% of applications that run on *nix desktops didn't want to accept middle-click to paste text where that's an operation that makes sense, I would agree with you. I do not believe that to be the case.
On the one hand, I'm all for having it configurable per app. But there should also be a global default, so that one doesn't need to set it for each program. The current proposal sounds as if I would need to activate it once in the compositor (Gnome) and then separately in Firefox. It should probably be centrally handled by the compositor (not sure if this is possible, don't know how primary selection works on Wayland).
I like using this on my desktop, but it's way too easy to trigger this by accident on a laptop, so I disable it on there.
If that's not optional, I'd have to leave Firefox for something else.
It is only going to be disabled-by-default
As a newgen (derogatory), Id appreciate this. Middle click has always been auto-scroll to me and it takes a good search to figure out how to disable it on a new installation.
as someone new to linux i don't get it. if you have your hand in ctrl-c anyway ctrl-v is right there?
It's like a second, separate clipboard. You "copy" text to this one by simply selecting it, then "paste" from it by middle-clicking.
There's also shift+insert if you want a keyboard shortcut. I remapped it to meh+v.
wait it is? that explains so much weirdness i had with this
@Reisen Among other things, it's useful in terminals where the standard ctrl-c/ctrl-v send a control signal rather than copy/paste. Most terminals nowadays have some other copy/paste shortcut so it's less important now, but a lot of us still find it convenient.
And the keyboard shortcut for primary clipboard paste (
Shift+Ins) is already gone from gtk.I am used to using middle mouse button to move canvas in both Krita and Inkscape. I know that it would be a silly default to just use it for movement, but countless missclicks in LibreOffice are reason good enough to be at least ocassionally frustrated over the default.
Well, I guess I'd have to use a fork of... oh, wait a second, I've already been alternating between Pale Moon, SeaMonkey, LibreWolf, and Firefox along with Tor and Links.
I just would be using less of Firefox and more of LibreWolf. And when Ladybird is ready, I'll use that and dillo.
Or you could change the preference to enable the feature again.
Except Ladybird is ran by a right wing guy 😞
I'd suggest looking at Servo or old KHTML if you want a true alternative
I'm still looking forward to a new browser engine, separate from Chrome and Gecko. The politics can be debated later, but we need something to break the Google stranglehold. Let's just be real about this, KHTML, Dillo, Links, and Goanna aren't doing it. Opera & Vivaldi aren't going to resurrect Presto.
So what then, other than Ladybird?
servo?
Waterfox?
Waterfox is Gecko. I still agree with the comment that mentions it is written by a right-winger. I rather root for Servo, especially because Ladybird is just another web engine written C. Memory safety vulnerabilities are the largest represented class of vulnerabilities discovered every year. Servo being fully written in Rust is a good thing for its security, as long as they also design a strong sandboxing/isolation strategy on all OS platforms.
You do you, that's fine with me. Waterfox is still an option for other people to consider when they're looking for an alternative. Like I would consider any new option that presents itself to me: I'm not married to my browser, at least in my eyes it is merely a tool :)
I tried Waterfox and didnt really get it? Why use it over for example Zen or Librewolf? It just seemed way to close to Firefox but like with a couple of preinstalled extensions. Idk, just wasn't for me.
My browser(s) is just a tool. I use many browsers for different things. I wish there were good alternatives to the main browser engines (Gecko, Blink, WebKit), but I am fine with just using good derivative browsers like Librewolf, Mullvad, Cromite, etc.
Yes, please. Lets dumb down userinterfaces more. I think the right mouse button should go away next, people can't rightclick on touchscreens anyway, and many are confused by the extra button.
/s. so many /s. thank good it's open source, if they ever remove the setting to turn it back on, i can just put the code back in.
That's exactly what's happening.