this post was submitted on 05 Jan 2026
125 points (91.4% liked)

Linux

10993 readers
333 users here now

A community for everything relating to the GNU/Linux operating system (except the memes!)

Also, check out:

Original icon base courtesy of lewing@isc.tamu.edu and The GIMP

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

Some projects keep surprising me with their “solutions,” and this is one of those cases. A proposal under review by developers from GNOME and Mozilla could change how middle-mouse-button paste behaves on Linux and other Unix-like systems.

The discussions, visible in Mozilla’s Phabricator revision D277804 and a linked GNOME gsettings-desktop-schemas merge request, focus on disabling the traditional primary selection paste by default.

Mozilla proposes changing the default behavior of the Firefox browser on Unix builds so that pressing the middle mouse button no longer pastes text by default. The author of the revision frames the current behavior as a source of confusion and accidental pastes, especially when users press the middle button without expecting the clipboard contents to be inserted into text fields.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] spartanatreyu@programming.dev 36 points 4 days ago (2 children)

What's with all the complaints here?

New users expect middle click to bring up an auto-scroll widget instead of pasting by default.

You can set up your computer how ever you want.

Want auto-scroll? Set it to auto-scroll.

Want paste? Set it to paste.

The first thing you do on a new system is set up the computer how you want.

No one's taking anything away from you.

[–] psud@aussie.zone 1 points 3 hours ago

The question though is who gets their preference as the default, and who has to reconfigure stuff

In this case they're giving the default to new users and letting X fans reconfigure which seems right to me.

[–] tyler@programming.dev 22 points 4 days ago

agreed. and middle click being paste has to be one of the stupidest defaults. I understand people use it, and whatever, everyone has their own workflow, but now middle click to drag doesn't work and you've confused everyone since now it's different everywhere.