Unix oldtimer here (first exposure: 1987). A lot of copy/pasting is at the shell prompt. Aside from being super lightweight - just select something in previous output, e.g. a file path, middle click, and done - what about the key bindings? All the world uses ^C for copy, but that already does something conflicting at the Unix shell prompt.
I have to admit that I do feel like an oldtimer though. What I do at the shell prompt, others do in VS Code, and probably 10x faster once they're good at the GUI. So maybe super-lightweight copy/paste at the shell prompt just doesn't matter that much any more.
The article makes it seem worse than it really is. All they seem to be doing is moving that functionality from being the default to an option that you enable.
Personally I heavily rely on the middle click to paste, especially with my docker workflows. Rather than having to click "CTRL+SHIFT+C" then "CTRL+SHIFT+V" every time, I just know whatever is highlighted will get pasted when I hit the middle click button. It's a subtle difference that saves maybe 1-2 seconds but combine that over the course of months and all of a sudden I've saved myself an hour with more efficient copy/paste.
Sure. But it's a depreciation and there's numerous similar settings that are only available by tweaking settings manually or using gnome-tweaks. Right now nearly every linux app supports select with the left button and paste with the middle. It's fast, useful, doesn't require a keyboard, etc. Amusingly I've seen various logins block control-v, but middle click works. God forbid you use a password safe with your bank login.
When you use gnome-tweaks there's a ton of "WARNING you may break things" and of course anything off the default path is likely to receive zero testing.
Personally I find middle click to paste one of the differentiators between MacOS, Windows, and Linux. I'm pretty surprised it's not more common. I was amused the iterm2 added select without having to type control-c.
Haven't used Linux in forever, but middle-click to paste was like the one thing that consistently worked everywhere. So it makes some sense that someone want to break it somewhere. With enough fingers meddling all conventions are broken. Wisdom of the crowds. Democracy.
(Actually I have been playing with Omarchy recently a tiny bit, inspired by the absolutely devestatingly bad macOS update. Initial tire-kicking was very positive. They had a "universal copy-paste" feature that still seemed WIP at the time...i.e. didn't work everywhere...)
> Feature I don't use must be removed! I unsupportedly claim that it is bad, and will zealously advocate for changing it. It's existed for a long time, but I shan't acknowlege why!
Why are people like this? Will Gnome reach apotheosis when they have removed all buttons and boxes and you just get a shiny rounded rectangle to admire?
I've always hated middle-click-paste, but trying to turn it off quickly rears a bigger issue, it's somehow deeply embedded in Linux, disabling it in Gnome would leave it enabled in other places like FireFox, which leads to searching how to disable it, which leads to recompiling the kernel, at least that's the rabbit hole I went down last time.
I have no opinion on whether it should be default or not, but I wish it was easier to control globally.
Well it's Gnome, next step is to remove right click.
They will first make the proposal as a tik tok video, since they seem to avoid anything that will speed up interaction, like reading or having sooo many buttons on your input devices.
Since the advent of LLMs, I've used them to juice up my Linux setup significantly.
I was already using Ubuntu with Gnome (the "flashback" version) and the XMonad tiling WM, but I've since ditched Gnome and switched to LXQt, and am pretty happy with it.
Then I installed Nix to override Ubuntu's aggressive Snap usage for applications like Firefox. (You can try to install it some other way, it'll just silently revert no matter how hard you try to configure it not to.)
Next step will be to eliminate Ubuntu entirely, because it's so focused on "end user" friendliness, it creates a terrible experience for anyone trying to customize their setup.
I'm very aware that I'm moving further and further off the "mainstream", but if the mainstream means "you will accept all our poorly thought-out and inefficient UI decisions", then there's not really a downside to that.
This is one of the toppest things in Linux desktop.
I agree that it can be teached more widely but then it is so fucking convenient, I think that 4/5 of my need of copy-paste are efficiently done like this.
Gnome has really this problem of young crappy devs that want to make a name by themselves by "breaking" something, like Google style. If they can't disrupt, then there is no fame.
And I would easily guess that this guy is running is Linux-gnome desktop from a MacBook...
Remind me when the idiots currently in charge at Ubuntu suddenly decided to put the closing buttons for windows in the upper left corner to mimic OSX.
They knew better... then it was the beginning of the downfall for Ubuntu that no sane person will use anymore.
Similarly gnome-terminal used to have "new terminal" as the first option in the menu of a terminal. Then it got moved down to 6th item, then in the newer versions removed completely.
> If we assume the Linux desktop has 4% market share, and assume the highly improbable fact that all of those 4% know how to use middle click paste and prefer it over the alternative autoscrolling, that's still 96% of users that are used to environments where autoscrolling is available and middle click paste doesn't exist
I don't know why they're using familiarity as an argument when GNOME has intentionally behaved completely differently from the Windows/Mac desktop for the past 15 years. I'm sure that having to launch software by clicking an unlabelled button on the top-left of the screen and then clicking the dots in the dock that appears on the bottom, or not having a visible overview of the windows onscreen without switching to fullscreen "activities mode", or not having any application status icons, or not being able to minimize windows, all cause more user confusion than middle click paste.
Of course all of this is completely fine. It's great that people are trying out new ways to use a computer, and I'm sure that there's lots of people that prefer the GNOME workflow. It's just that when you already have to re-learn how to use a desktop in order to use GNOME, I don't see the point in acting like middle click paste is a step too far.
> Having an option is fine; we do in Plasma. They can have any default they want too, I don't care.
> What's bad is this MR doing it at a GTK level. It's that lack of even thinking about what inconsistencies that would cause for GTK apps running anywhere outside gnome and other toolkits running on Gnome that comes across quite badly.
> gsettings-desktop-schemas will be pulled in [on other desktops] as it's a reverse dep of many other things, including xdg-desktop-portal-gtk, which is required for use on all desktops to avoid having messed up GTK fonts in your flatpak apps.
> "we have to cater to what 96% of users know"
Indeed.
Just recently saw a talk "Are we stuck with the same Desktop UX forever? | Ubuntu Summit 25.10" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1fZTOjd_bOQ) where Scott Jenson (Apple/Google UX) laments we stopped innovating on Desktop.
Such appeal to conformity is indeed quite sad from GNOME.
22 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 41.2 ms ] threadI have to admit that I do feel like an oldtimer though. What I do at the shell prompt, others do in VS Code, and probably 10x faster once they're good at the GUI. So maybe super-lightweight copy/paste at the shell prompt just doesn't matter that much any more.
Personally I heavily rely on the middle click to paste, especially with my docker workflows. Rather than having to click "CTRL+SHIFT+C" then "CTRL+SHIFT+V" every time, I just know whatever is highlighted will get pasted when I hit the middle click button. It's a subtle difference that saves maybe 1-2 seconds but combine that over the course of months and all of a sudden I've saved myself an hour with more efficient copy/paste.
When you use gnome-tweaks there's a ton of "WARNING you may break things" and of course anything off the default path is likely to receive zero testing.
Personally I find middle click to paste one of the differentiators between MacOS, Windows, and Linux. I'm pretty surprised it's not more common. I was amused the iterm2 added select without having to type control-c.
must be a slow news day.
(Actually I have been playing with Omarchy recently a tiny bit, inspired by the absolutely devestatingly bad macOS update. Initial tire-kicking was very positive. They had a "universal copy-paste" feature that still seemed WIP at the time...i.e. didn't work everywhere...)
Why are people like this? Will Gnome reach apotheosis when they have removed all buttons and boxes and you just get a shiny rounded rectangle to admire?
They will first make the proposal as a tik tok video, since they seem to avoid anything that will speed up interaction, like reading or having sooo many buttons on your input devices.
Remove Gnome ASAP because after they remove your ability to control anything on your computer you won't be able to remove it anymore.
Not that it wasn't possible before of course, but OS/distro dev across the entire stack surely spans an insane breadth and depth of knowledge.
I was already using Ubuntu with Gnome (the "flashback" version) and the XMonad tiling WM, but I've since ditched Gnome and switched to LXQt, and am pretty happy with it.
Then I installed Nix to override Ubuntu's aggressive Snap usage for applications like Firefox. (You can try to install it some other way, it'll just silently revert no matter how hard you try to configure it not to.)
Next step will be to eliminate Ubuntu entirely, because it's so focused on "end user" friendliness, it creates a terrible experience for anyone trying to customize their setup.
I'm very aware that I'm moving further and further off the "mainstream", but if the mainstream means "you will accept all our poorly thought-out and inefficient UI decisions", then there's not really a downside to that.
I agree that it can be teached more widely but then it is so fucking convenient, I think that 4/5 of my need of copy-paste are efficiently done like this.
Gnome has really this problem of young crappy devs that want to make a name by themselves by "breaking" something, like Google style. If they can't disrupt, then there is no fame.
And I would easily guess that this guy is running is Linux-gnome desktop from a MacBook...
Remind me when the idiots currently in charge at Ubuntu suddenly decided to put the closing buttons for windows in the upper left corner to mimic OSX. They knew better... then it was the beginning of the downfall for Ubuntu that no sane person will use anymore.
Very frustrating.
It's one of those remnants of ancient UX, like focus on hover.
> If we assume the Linux desktop has 4% market share, and assume the highly improbable fact that all of those 4% know how to use middle click paste and prefer it over the alternative autoscrolling, that's still 96% of users that are used to environments where autoscrolling is available and middle click paste doesn't exist
I don't know why they're using familiarity as an argument when GNOME has intentionally behaved completely differently from the Windows/Mac desktop for the past 15 years. I'm sure that having to launch software by clicking an unlabelled button on the top-left of the screen and then clicking the dots in the dock that appears on the bottom, or not having a visible overview of the windows onscreen without switching to fullscreen "activities mode", or not having any application status icons, or not being able to minimize windows, all cause more user confusion than middle click paste.
Of course all of this is completely fine. It's great that people are trying out new ways to use a computer, and I'm sure that there's lots of people that prefer the GNOME workflow. It's just that when you already have to re-learn how to use a desktop in order to use GNOME, I don't see the point in acting like middle click paste is a step too far.
Edit: I also saw an interesting point made by a KDE developer on the Linux Reddit board: https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1q4viq9/disable_prim...
> Having an option is fine; we do in Plasma. They can have any default they want too, I don't care.
> What's bad is this MR doing it at a GTK level. It's that lack of even thinking about what inconsistencies that would cause for GTK apps running anywhere outside gnome and other toolkits running on Gnome that comes across quite badly.
> gsettings-desktop-schemas will be pulled in [on other desktops] as it's a reverse dep of many other things, including xdg-desktop-portal-gtk, which is required for use on all desktops to avoid having messed up GTK fonts in your flatpak apps.
Such appeal to conformity is indeed quite sad from GNOME.