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Comment by iso1210 | Hacker News Reader

Why would I press a key to copy/paste?

Highlight text, then middle click

Because often I need to highlight text in the terminal, copy it, then highlight text somewhere else (e.g. in a text input field in a browser, the address bar in the browser, etc.) and paste over it. Selecting the specific destination text I want to overwrite blows away my previous selection.

In many cases I do just highlight and right-click where I want the text pasted. But that workflow doesn't work a large portion of the time and I need a clipboard that isn't being wiped out almost any time I click on something.

> Selecting the specific destination text I want to overwrite blows away my previous selection.

Oof, is this the normal Linux behavior? That sounds annoying. In MacOS every app (or even tab) has its own separate highlight that it maintains. So in your example, selecting text in the browser would leave the terminal unaffected, and when you bring the terminal back to the foreground your text is still highlighted.

The highlight doesn't vanish, the clipboard contents do, because that's global and it gets written on highlight.

Nitpick: You're talking about the primary selection, not the clipboard. Those are two different distinct things.

It doesn't surprise me to learn that at all, because I've been confused about having two clipboards in Linux. But I don't remember hearing the term "primary selection" - my interpretation of the behavior was that there are just two separate clipboards. I guess that's not accurate - why not?

I've been using Pop_OS for the past few months, and haven't had any issues resembling this whatsoever. Of course my clipboard gets overwritten if I don't use a utility that saves previous text selections, but I don't recall this being a feature in any of the Windows/Mac/Linux Operating Systems by default.

X11 supports this with a secondary selection. Unfortunately this functionality isn't exposed in any modern UI toolkits. It does work with Motif apps though.

Muscle memory, no middle click on most trackpads. It just feels weird coming from a browser after using Control+C to copy something and then having to use Control+Shift+V to paste. I never got used to the right click to paste paradigm. I expect a context menu.

I've never used a non-mac laptop without a middle button.

Muscle memory and 'the way things work' works both ways. You have to jump through hoops to do basic things like focus-follows-mouse/raise on click, multiple desktops, alt-drag to move a window etc (to be honest I'm not sure if you can even do those on a mac)

ThinkPads are what I reach for on the PC side of things, and those still have a dedicated middle button for the most part. Otherwise I can't think of a single modern example of a laptop with a middle button. They're all click pads these days like Macs.

The standard unix 3rd button emulation is left+right click at the same time. Should work pretty much everywhere without configuration.

In the case of "tap to click", a 3 finger tap would also emulate this, or as a middle mouse click.

> no middle click on most trackpads

If your trackpad has multitouch, triple touch should correspond to the middle click. Works for me on Linux by default.

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