Mixed opinions on this. More than once I've accidentally middle clicked on a text box and sent the contents to some server. Or middle clicking the new tab button will navigate to whatever is in your clipboard, or do a web search if it isn't a URL. Hasn't been anything confidential yet, but it is possible. I try to clear the clipboard asap for this very reason.
As a compulsive text highlighter, I’ve always found this feature more trouble than it’s worth, by a pretty wide margin. Plus, its inability to replace text means I have to be familiar with the keyboard shortcuts anyway. I find it easier to use just the one set of commands. I’d get tripped up over “wait, did I copy that, or just highlight it?” otherwise. Better for me to have just the one habit.
I understand that some folks really like it but can’t quite grasp why. Though I believe them when they say it’s useful for them.
Is this one of the costs of 'the year of the linux desktop' - mac and windows users migrating to linux and getting confused by 'selecting text puts it in the clipboard without confirmation' and 'middle click pastes the clipboard contents'?
fwiw I find the workflow advantages of it questionable, since I often want to select some text and ctrl+v to replace it with the clipboard.
This is an very user-powerful feature. WHY the fuck would they disable it? It basically gives you two buffers, middle click for dynamic selection-paste. repetitive-chunks of text can use the more cumbersome ctl-c/v. I've been using this feature since before linux was a thing. When I teach it to young engineers now they find it quite useful. STOP trying to turn everything into a mimic of a damn smart phone OS!
What a piss poor article. I don't really care about the feature because I use the keyboard for c&p but revisiting and revaluating old features is fine and shouldn't immediately trigger old men yells at cloud articles like this. I am glad they reimplemented it for Wayland to ease the transition but it should not be something expected. There is also barely any discussion in the links yet. The Linux community really is the primary cast in the Soap Opera for tech bros.
the title contradicts what's in the actual article.
the proposal is to change the default beahvior, not getting rid of the ability outright. as long as they both retain the ability to change the behavior back to how was before, it doesn't seem like this is as dire as the author is trying to make it out.
I sympathize with the idea of having to add yet another setting change to what I'm sure is a long list of configs/settings updates that most of us have to perform everytime we boot up a new system but this is all that it looks like would be the case here if this proposal goes through
As a person who have used this for decades, the first thing I will do is re-enable it bu default. This is one of the main reasons I stick with X. If it is disabled, I guess I go elsewhere. I do not use GNOME anyway, so GNOME can do whatever it wants, it won't impact me.
I never tried Wayland, but does middle paste even exist between wayland windows ?
Mozilla, please stop leveling down to others! Recently I discovered that Firefox goes to great lengths to discard <textarea> undo-redo history after it's been changed specifically via JS for web-platform (aka Chrome) compatibility.
I am at a point where I don't know which is which, and why and who, but it drives me up a wall when I go to paste something, and somehow its in my mouse wheel instead of ctrl + v when I go to the terminal, or worse, I highlight text, and somehow its now copied. Or things just don't copy whatsoever when I hit ctrl + c, because either I ctrl + c'd on Discord / Teams and it copied the empty text input box and overrode my copied stuff, or who knows what. WHY IS COPY AND PASTE BROKEN IN 2026.
I've been in hundreds of meetings, watching someone highlight something, copy it with the mouse, then go over to Teams and they somehow LOSE what they copied. Hundreds of calls like this.
If you work at Discord or Microsoft stop replacing my keyboard contents if the text input field is EMPTY because I accidentally hit Ctrl C before I got to hit Ctrl V.
It's sad how both the author of the FF bug and Gnome merge fail Chesterton's fence. One calls it "very weird" and the other blithely calls it an "X11ism."
My understanding is it's a cross-DE way to highlight text in a terminal and paste it into the browser, useful for a debugging search and/or bug reports.
Is there a more common way of achieving this that works across all terminal apps and browser types in Linux?
I preferred the middle button since 1995, but couldn't care less nowadays.
I'm jumping between platforms and sadly the copy'n'paste behaviour seems to be unnecessary complex on Linux these days. Even WSL2 only improves it slightly.
Everytime I try to come closer to a unified experience some other issue arouses.
I wouldn't mind changing any current setup to have a truly unified Linux, Windows, macOS experience -- no matter the sacrifices.
Wonderful, another default I'll have to change to have the correct behaviour for me.
However... "This is an X11ism, originally an xsetting 1 which frequently results is in unexpected behavior when people pressing the middle mouse button."
Does this even work on Wayland? I'm still using X11 for many reasons, including highlight/middle-click-paste.
I'm not surprised that GNOME would contemplate this: it seems like a very GNOME-y thing to do. (And maybe this is a good thing for GNOME users. But this kind of thing is also why I use KDE.) But why would Firefox feel the need to touch this? Surely this is a DE-level setting, and Firefox should simply go along with the DE behavior so that its behavior is consistent with the rest of the apps running in the desktop session.
I was completely confused when I recently discovered this behavior. I've been using middle-click to open tabs in macOS and Windows for years, and I could not understand why it automatically pasted whatever was in my clipboard.
I think it makes total sense to change the default to be aligned with the other platforms, and leave power-users the choice to keep it enabled if they wish.
> I think it makes total sense to change the default to be aligned with the other platforms, and leave power-users the choice to keep it enabled if they wish.
I think it makes total sense to not use cmd-c/cmd-v in Firefox on mac to be aligned with the other platforms, and leave power-users the choice to keep it enabled if they wish.
Keep in mind the desktop env knows when you are left clicking a link or middle clicking. So on linux, usually it's left click to go to a link or middle click to open link in a new tab.
Middle click to open new tabs is compatible with middle click to paste.
As a former Windows user I find the middle mouse paste feature makes Gnome nearly unusable. At least Firefox has an option to disable it. However, Chromium and by extension most Electron apps do not have any setting to disable this on Wayland: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/3744
I'm with the Mozilla commenter who suggests "If the feature should be deprecated, the first place for such a change would be the platform toolkits". I sometimes use apps where Ctrl-V doesn't paste, and they drive me crazy.
I would also argue that they should leave middle click alone - "some users are confused" doesn't strike me as a good enough reason for removing a 30-years-old Linux feature (someone will always be confused) and I'm willing to bet they don't have enough data to onow how many users are not confused.
Then again, Gnome's "we know better than you" attitude is why I switched to Mate years ago.
Oh, I so love pasting random sensitive text that is also irrelevant into some professional conversation, and not noticing it. Only because I select the text I read, and accidentally pressed that button upon scrolling. Thank you very much. Happy to see you go, Mr UX guru.
What we need is a decoupling of the keyboard/mouse events and common shared application functionality.
In my opinion apps should offer an API for cut/copy/paste and the DE maps it to concrete events like Ctrl-C. This would make it easy for people that switch between Mac and Linux to have copy on Super-C and keep Ctrl-C for cancel in the terminal.
Just as a single data point: I use middle mouse paste maybe 90% of the time. The only inconvenience is that you can't select and copy, then select some other text and replace it with what you copied. Oh, and I've been using Wayland full-time for more than 4 years.
This is IMO the correct decision, and I say that as a regular user of middle-click paste. Middle-click paste is a classic convenience/security tradeoff. It's faster than using the keyboard, but it makes it very easy to accidentally leak confidential information. In all such tradeoffs, the default setting should favor security.
Only if the option was removed entirely would I have reason to complain.
In reality such features are often dropped, no settings in gnome-settings, and non default features are not tested in new builds.
So you end up googling how to get that feature back and the answer is manually navigating the config tree or using gnome-tweaks, both with large disclaimers that any changes might break your system.
No thanks, I'd rather have left click to select and middle click to paste, do we really have to involve the keyboard by default?
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 69.9 ms ] threadFirefox have been pretty random with primary selection just not working in random cases and it has been massively annoying
I understand that some folks really like it but can’t quite grasp why. Though I believe them when they say it’s useful for them.
fwiw I find the workflow advantages of it questionable, since I often want to select some text and ctrl+v to replace it with the clipboard.
the proposal is to change the default beahvior, not getting rid of the ability outright. as long as they both retain the ability to change the behavior back to how was before, it doesn't seem like this is as dire as the author is trying to make it out.
I sympathize with the idea of having to add yet another setting change to what I'm sure is a long list of configs/settings updates that most of us have to perform everytime we boot up a new system but this is all that it looks like would be the case here if this proposal goes through
I never tried Wayland, but does middle paste even exist between wayland windows ?
I've been in hundreds of meetings, watching someone highlight something, copy it with the mouse, then go over to Teams and they somehow LOSE what they copied. Hundreds of calls like this.
If you work at Discord or Microsoft stop replacing my keyboard contents if the text input field is EMPTY because I accidentally hit Ctrl C before I got to hit Ctrl V.
My understanding is it's a cross-DE way to highlight text in a terminal and paste it into the browser, useful for a debugging search and/or bug reports.
Is there a more common way of achieving this that works across all terminal apps and browser types in Linux?
However... "This is an X11ism, originally an xsetting 1 which frequently results is in unexpected behavior when people pressing the middle mouse button."
Does this even work on Wayland? I'm still using X11 for many reasons, including highlight/middle-click-paste.
I think it makes total sense to change the default to be aligned with the other platforms, and leave power-users the choice to keep it enabled if they wish.
I think it makes total sense to not use cmd-c/cmd-v in Firefox on mac to be aligned with the other platforms, and leave power-users the choice to keep it enabled if they wish.
See what I did ther?
Middle click to open new tabs is compatible with middle click to paste.
I would also argue that they should leave middle click alone - "some users are confused" doesn't strike me as a good enough reason for removing a 30-years-old Linux feature (someone will always be confused) and I'm willing to bet they don't have enough data to onow how many users are not confused.
Then again, Gnome's "we know better than you" attitude is why I switched to Mate years ago.
In my opinion apps should offer an API for cut/copy/paste and the DE maps it to concrete events like Ctrl-C. This would make it easy for people that switch between Mac and Linux to have copy on Super-C and keep Ctrl-C for cancel in the terminal.
Just as a single data point: I use middle mouse paste maybe 90% of the time. The only inconvenience is that you can't select and copy, then select some other text and replace it with what you copied. Oh, and I've been using Wayland full-time for more than 4 years.
Only if the option was removed entirely would I have reason to complain.
In reality such features are often dropped, no settings in gnome-settings, and non default features are not tested in new builds.
So you end up googling how to get that feature back and the answer is manually navigating the config tree or using gnome-tweaks, both with large disclaimers that any changes might break your system.
No thanks, I'd rather have left click to select and middle click to paste, do we really have to involve the keyboard by default?