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.
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.
Finally!
I’m honestly baffled. These are two companies that are clearly past their best days, largely because of a string of controversial decisions in recent years that have pushed many users toward alternatives that feel more reasonable and do not attempt to re-educate users’ behavior.
On point 👌
do not attempt to re-educate users’ behavior.
They shove Onedrive down your throat until your rectum starts to bleed ffs
why do you want to attack me personally?
It’d be so easy for them to just add “by default” to the end of the title.
From time to time I have to be reminded that this exists.
It can be re-enabled with the following command (source is the Merge Request linked in the article):
gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface gtk-enable-primary-paste true
Can imagine some distros will override the GNOME default here.
Kinda curious why would X11 have that many clipboards to begin with. Different people implemented their personal macros perhaps…?
Middle click was standard initially in Unix world, then Microsoft Office came with it’s Ctrl-C, and users now expect every text editor to support Ctrl-C to copy (and not abort the active command like all terminals do).
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
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!
Well fuck me. That’s kinda neat.
Shame it doesn’t subsequently work with ctrl+v, because that would be even cooler.
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”.
In most programs, you can paste the primary selection with Shift+Insert
on some apps; it works with ctrl-shift-v. so ctrl-v for the clipboard, and ctrl-shift-v for the cut buffer.
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…)
I might switch away from GNOME if this passes. I’ve lost enough QoL features/UI degradations already with no option to go back.
They only discuss to disable it by default, not removing the functionality.
That’s at least an improvement, I didn’t think GNOME had it in them to add more user-defined options.
i dont understand why this is a conversation. shouldnt we just have the option to turn it on and off?
The option is there, the news is that GNOME changed the default value.
ah ok. thanks
“Oh don’t worry, ChatGPT can just type that text in for you when you need it”. /s
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve accidentally pasted random private stuff from that goddamn middle click into WEB PAGES! Things that can read whatever text you type without having to explicitly submit anything. It’s a horrible thing for a new user to discover by accident. It’s such an unexpected feature to new users, and no one gets told about it, ever. You simply discover it by accident.
This is a good change, not having it on by default.
To all the haters of this idea, god forbid we make Linux less weird by default for people migrating from Windows.
All that said, I have learned to love select-to-copy and middle-click paste. Especially in the terminal.
And that is the exact reason that was given in the gnome merge request. A user being able to accidentally paste a bunch of text they didnt even know they’d copied incredibly design.
Until this article I didn’t even know you could middle-click paste.
I’ve done it countless times by mistake in Discord when trying to scroll through a channel…
Haha same, never thought of it as a problem to be fixed but see no reason to stop having it as the default, Ctrl+Shift+V works same as middle click to paste in terminal.
Yeah, I use that, too. It might differ from DE to DE, but in KDE, there’s the normal clipboard, and then there’s the one for selections and middle-click. They don’t share the same contents by default, but you can enable that.
This. Only correct comment in the entire thread. Rest are people who probably don’t even use computers and have no idea what a mouse is.
Awful, one of the first things I disable along side 1 click folder opening.
Do any DEs still have 1 click folder opening by default?
That’s the real linux user story.
We come for the speed, flexibility, FOSS values … but we STAY for the middle mouse paste.
