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Gnome and Mozilla Discuss Proposal to Disable Middle Mouse Paste on Linux
- nateb2022 9mo agoI've gotten used to middle mouse opening links in a new tab.
- olyjohn 9mo agoThat still works just fine, I use it all the time too. It's just when you middle-click in a text box that it pastes the clipboard. Otherwise, what will middle-click do, nothing?
- napkinartist 9mo ago[dead]
- phantasmish 9mo ago… wait, I was pretty sure the behavior used to be to paste whatever you had most recently highlighted. When did that change? Or am I crazy?
- AlecSchueler 9mo agoThat's the behaviour unless you're hovering over an active link, in which case it opens in a background tab.
- nehal3m 9mo agoThat's still the behavior on Mint 22.2 and Firefox 146.0.1
- nashashmi 9mo agoI never knew this feature existed. I wish I knew other fun Linux tricks.
- wolvoleo 9mo agoIt's been a staple since the 90s in X windows so it makes sense the browsers did it too on Linux
- PunchyHamster 9mo agoOh for fucks sake fix your code instead of fucking with users. Firefox have been pretty random with primary selection just not working in random cases and it has been massively annoying
- The_President 9mo agoRuled out cases of a site implementing user-select: none?
- PunchyHamster 9mo agoI'm not talking about blocking selection (which is annoying too but different issue) There are cases where you can select text, ctrl+c works, but just selecting it doesn't copy it to primary clipboard (example I hit often is various CI/CD text fields like in Jenkins)
- javcasas 9mo agoDon't blame it on FF, but on CSS user-select: none https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Reference/Properties/user-select https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Reference/P...
- PunchyHamster 9mo agoI'm not talking about blocking selection (which is annoying too but different issue) There are cases where you can select text, ctrl+c works, but just selecting it doesn't copy it to primary clipboard (example I hit often is various CI/CD text fields like in Jenkins)
- eitau_1 9mo agoSad reality of replacing plain old text boxes with "smarter" re-implementations: https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/web/WebEditingVsCutAndPaste https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/web/WebEditingVsCut... Some (including the most popular: codemirror) go as far as putting themselves inside "natural" selection flow: they're interpreting mouse inputs, cancelling default behavior and selecting text themselves (programmatically via setSelectionRange). And Firefox deliberately ignores such selection: https://searchfox.org/firefox-main/rev/edb7c6118aa4fc5b09d84371ad67e805640920d6/layout/generic/nsFrameSelection.cpp#3147-3152 https://searchfox.org/firefox-main/rev/edb7c6118aa4fc5b09d84...
- genter 9mo agoMixed 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.
- phantasmish 9mo agoAs 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.
- napkinartist 9mo ago[dead]
- manbart 9mo agoConvenience. You can copy/paste without touching the keyboard at all
- bilkow 9mo agoYou don't need primary selection to avoid the keyboard, you can also hold right-click on your selection and release it on "copy" (or right-click on your selection then left-click on copy, more intuitive but slightly more cumbersome) I agree it's less convenient (there's an extra step: explicitly copying the text), but in my experience it's also more reliable as you don't lose it by just selecting anything.
- oldandboring 9mo ago> I’d get tripped up over “wait, did I copy that, or just highlight it?” I think I'm in this boat too. I use this feature, I'm accustomed to it, but throughout my day I am constantly forgetting whether something is in my selection buffer or my clipboard. Windows and Mac users just don't have this problem.
- ikidd 9mo agoIt's the thing you do most with selected text and it removes the need to use a keyboard shortcut. Selecting text with no purpose and being worried that it's a security hole is like saying "I leave my car on the street with the keys in it therefore nobody should have keys".
- kg 9mo agoIs 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.
- vachina 9mo ago> 'selecting text puts it in the clipboard without confirmation' and 'middle click pastes the clipboard contents' This behavior is not consistent across applications in Linux even.
- BeetleB 9mo ago> This behavior is not consistent across applications in Linux even. The only application I've seen it (occasionally) not work is Emacs. I have a line in my config to ensure it always works. In over 20 years of using Linux, I don't think I've encountered an app where middle click to paste doesn't work.
- jrexilius 9mo agoThis 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!
- doodlesdev 9mo ago> WHY the fuck would they disable it? Because it's one of the most annoying and unintuitive things the GNOME desktop has for anyone that isn't a power user. Almost every single user I've shown GNOME to was surprised or bothered by this being the default instead of the usual scrolling you'd see in Windows. I personally dislike this feature a lot, and it's very common for me to middle-click paste accidentally, even after years of using Fedora Linux as my one and only operating system across all of my machines. I've previously used a Firefox extension to override this default, but was bothered by the fact that other applications would still just middle-click paste. Not everyone is a power user. Not everyone has the same workflow as you. Decisions like these have to be taken based on what the target audience for a desktop wishes. Arguably, GNOME is absolutely not for power users (just take a look at how similar it is to the macOS desktop environment to notice that).
- shevy-java 9mo ago> Decisions like these have to be taken based on what the target audience for a desktop wishes. Ok: can you show us the poll done by GNOME devs here? Please add the URL.
- doodlesdev 9mo agoA poll done by GNOME devs will largely be answered by people who are power users. Knowing your target audience is harder than just polling your users or taking telemetry (in this case, because telemetry normally excludes power users, since they will disable it). I think it's just clear that the proposal of the GNOME desktop is to be pretty democratic, both in types of devices it can run on and the variety of users. The project gets a lot of shit for many decisions it takes (some of which I also disagree with), but I think changing this default is absolutely justified.
- BoredPositron 9mo agoWhat 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.
- sparrish 9mo agoNo! Don't take my scroll wheel paste. I use it hundreds of times a day.
- shbooms 9mo agothe 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
- AlecSchueler 9mo agoIt really should be the default though, as it's the default behaviour in basically every app.
- Aachen 9mo agoI was confused when starting to use Linux Mint. Sometimes when scrolling fast, some text would appear, but not always, and I also couldn't predict which text. I suspected the middle mouse button, but purposefully pressing it didn't work so I ruled it out at first It took a while to realise it is the combination of: - having selected something - hovering over an editable field - pressing the middle mouse button But now, a few years down the line, I cannot live without. It is so convenient to, for example, copy the password and then double click the username and paste them both with the flick of the mouse and a ctrl+v. Nearly every time I touch my partner's Windows device for 5 minutes, I run into a situation where it would have been convenient and saved a second trip back and forth between two tabs or windows Default off is where neat things go to die because the discovery factor is gone, it gets forgotten, falls out of use, and becomes only a burden to maintain > It really should be the default though The current setting is a net win imo. What desktop environments could do is explain what just happened when you use it for the first time, so that you don't accidentally paste data somewhere without realising it
- shevy-java 9mo ago> it doesn't seem like this is as dire as the author is trying to make it out. First you make it as an option. Then you remove the option. This is GNOME development style.
- jmclnx 9mo agoAs 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 ?
- cossatot 9mo agoIt does on my fedora KDE machine at least. It is probably in the top 5 usability improvements of linux over mac in my world.
- eitau_1 9mo agoMozilla, 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.
- jszymborski 9mo agoWell TIL you could do that!
- giancarlostoro 9mo agoI 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.
- shevy-java 9mo agoIt can be confusing, but I reason it still saves time. I would not want to use Linux without middle mouse button paste feature. Even if it is an xorg-ism.
- giancarlostoro 9mo agoI'm pretty sure I'm on Wayland on Arch with KDE, but I could be wrong?
- eitau_1 9mo agoNormal clipboard and selection "clipboard" (i.e. primary selection) are two separate boxes. Some apps (totally wrongfully IMO) override both when copying (example: Firefox's Web Developer Tools (e.g. copy element's innerHTML) but weirdly not the browser itself)
- palata 9mo ago> WHY IS COPY AND PASTE BROKEN IN 2026. I believe your experience, but I'm quite amazed: I have been using the selection clipboard all the time for 15 years, and I never had such issues.
- 9mo ago
- jancsika 9mo agoIt'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?
- proaralyst 9mo agoIt's a feature of X (so works in any app running in X, not just FF and your terminal emulator). Wayland changed clipboard behaviour (along with many other things) and decided the selection clipboard was too large a security hole to keep. It's pretty useful though, so Gnome added it back, on top of Wayland. It's still a large security hole though! Separately, PuTTY has a similar mechanism for copy, though this goes in the normal Windows clipboard.
- GuestFAUniverse 9mo agoI 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.
- antonyh 9mo agoWonderful, 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.
- c0l0 9mo agoYeah, they can fuck right off with that kind of shit idea.
- shevy-java 9mo agoTwo evil combining to cripple users. I am so glad there are alternatives to these two dictating down onto the user base.
- nycticorax 9mo agoI'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.
- bitwize 9mo agoThey're just moving to abolish something that should have been abolished decades ago, but wasn't for XKCD 1172 reasons.
- xerox13ster 9mo agoIf they take away my space heater I riot. But in all seriousness, why are we moving away from usability features ingrained into muscle memory after 30 years across all desktop computing platforms? Have we not learned in the past 10 to 20 years that pandering to the lowest common denominator destroys good software and turns it into an enshittified mess? We need to stop removing features because people are too stupid to use them. If they’re too stupid to use the features they’re too stupid to use the product.
- nycticorax 9mo agoMiddle-click paste is faster than Ctrl-C-then-Ctrl-V. And if you are a developer, you often find yourself copying long strings from one place to another. And it has been a standard behavior on Linux since the 1990s. This just seems to me like more of GNOME's "simplicity at all costs" run amok. I'm a power user. I want poser user features. So I use KDE, a project run by people who care about power users and their needs. I'm happy for you if GNOME meets your needs.
- outadoc 9mo agoI 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.
- palata 9mo ago> I think it makes total sense to change the default to be aligned with the other platforms I have been using Linux for 20 years, and I don't remember a time where this did not exist. I don't see a reason to change it now "to be aligned with the other platforms". If I wanted to run on Windows or macOS, I would run on Windows or macOS. No reason to try to get Linux to become Windows or macOS IMO.
- seba_dos1 9mo agoWhy is "aligning with other platforms" a goal at all? The whole reason for having multiple platforms is that they don't have to align with each other.
- nofriend 9mo agoWhy would middle click not open tabs? You middle click a link to open it in a new tab, you middle click a text box to paste into it. Neither interfere with the other. On windows, you can middle click anywhere on the page (except links, ofc) to go into a scrolling mode where dragging your mouse around changes the scrolling direction. I don't think many people use that feature, but it's there, and doesn't work on linux.
- yjftsjthsd-h 9mo ago> 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. If you want to use another platform, use another platform. Desktop Linux doesn't need to conform to them.
- wink 9mo ago> 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?
- Gliding7682 9mo agoAs 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 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/3744
- eitau_1 9mo agoAlthough I very like this feature, I find it insane there's no config option to disable it x-wide / compositor-wide.
- Gliding7682 9mo agoI'm glad it's possible to disable it on KDE + Wayland. I don't know if it's just me, but when I tried to use Gnome with a touchpad I ended up pasting text everywhere.
- probably_wrong 9mo agoI'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.
- BoredPositron 9mo agoGnome implemented it in Mutter for their Wayland session because it's an x feature...
- mzajc 9mo agoThe "we know better than you" attitude unfortunately seems increasingly popular at KDE as well[1][2][3]. [1] https://pointieststick.com/2024/02/09/this-week-in-kde-inching-closer/ https://pointieststick.com/2024/02/09/this-week-in-kde-inchi... search "Active screen follows mouse" [2] https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=481069 https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=481069 [3] https://blogs.kde.org/2025/11/26/going-all-in-on-a-wayland-future/ https://blogs.kde.org/2025/11/26/going-all-in-on-a-wayland-f...
- wltr 9mo agoOh, 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.
- weinzierl 9mo agoWhat 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.
- mrob 9mo agoThis 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.
- rich_sasha 9mo agoI half agree, but rather I'd say secrets shouldn't go into clipboard. Have some kind of separate channel for it. It is insane to me that so many workflows rely on putting secrets into a box any app or even webpage can peek into. I love selecting some text in the terminal, then just middle-clicking and... aaahhh!
- sliken 9mo agoIn theory I'd agree as well. 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?
- rascul 9mo agoThis seems odd to me. It's a feature I've grown quite fond of over the decades, and this is the first time I've heard about people not liking it. Maybe I've been in a bubble.
- kkfx 9mo agoAs usual Gnome do it's best to alienate users and have some who restore good behaviors as the can. Meanwhile the fraction of power users who still use Gnome are less and less. In few years if they keep going they'll earn a share of Windows expatriate newbies and lost all power users, becoming then irrelevant like many who have choose the same path.
- sudobash1 9mo agoFor those who want to disable middle-click paste, KDE already has this as a setting (of course it does, everything is a setting in KDE). Under "General Behavior" there is a checkbox for "Middle-click pastes selected text". Personally, I find middle-click primary selection paste one of the nicest conveniences in Linux, along with Alt (or Meta) dragging of windows. But if GNOME made it a default-off option that wouldn't be the end of the world. Those of us who love it would quickly seek out the option to enable it. But I get the impression that GNOME tends to value opinionated simplicity, and I wouldn't be surprised if that default-off option just disappeared after a while.
- johnea 9mo agoFuck Gnome and Mozilla! Middle button paste is one of the greatest day-to-day, click-to-click, UI efficiency improvements offered in a *nix environment!. Of course, the "copy" part is also important: That is, the text only need be marked, no right-click menu COPY, or Ctrl-Anything required. Mark, and Middle-click, Done! It sounds like the real security hole is the need for an "I'm an Idiot" mode on most computers...
- blackfawn 9mo agoChromium and those based off it (Chrome, Brave, etc.) seem to have already implemented this recently on the "new tab" button. I'm so used to highlighting a link or text I want to search for and middle-clicking the new tab button to open that link or search for the text and now as of some recent update, it no longer works. I keep trying by habit and muttering when I remember it's suddenly broken. I didn't see any option in settings nor much info when I searched.