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Comment by macNchz | Hacker News Reader

The X “primary selection”/middle click paste behavior this takes advantage of is one of my least favorite Linux features and I have had it disabled for years, so I didn’t even know it had been changed/removed in Wayland.

Having a single mouse button (that often has other functionality like autoscroll in Firefox) cause text highlighted in another app to paste in the focused app is super unintuitive to me, and caused a few significant annoyances unintentionally pasting secrets or private messages in the wrong place before I got rid of it.

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I cannot stand any Operating System that does not utilize left-click highlight and middle click paste. This is great secondary buffer to the clipboard Ctrl+C && Ctrl+V. I HATE the middle click scrolling feature that Windows uses, it is not user-friendly and not needed in the age of the scroll-wheel. Another reason you have to pay me to use Windows.

What makes that feature "not user-friendly" instead of just a personal preference?

Not OP, but I can say that it is a mode, which is its problem. You enter into the scroll mode and while not difficult per se to exit it can cause confusion. It is also pretty superfluous in the age of the touchpad and the ubiquity of the scroll wheel. Just another example of Microsoft working really hard to make Windows 11 look simpler, but not working on making it meaningfully simpler.

I don't know when middle-click scroll was introduced, but it definitely was before Windows 11, and at least as far back as 7.

Also, "no modes" is both a question of personal preference and a sliding scale. Input-has-focus is a mode, too, but getting rid of that would be an obvious mistake.

Middle-click scroll has been around as long as I can remember having middle-click. At least as far back as Windows XP.

Windows 95 had it.

Middle-click scroll was a feature of the Windows 3.1 drivers for a Logitech TrackMan I bought in 1994 or so.

Yeah, it's not a new thing, but an ancient thing, from the days of the button mice (a third button in the center---no scroll wheel).

You are not the only user.

A few years ago, after being unable to configure OS-X for highlight-copy and middle-click-paste, I turned in the brand new MacBook and requested a simple laptop to install Debian and KDE on.

I hardly ever touch the mouse, but if I am using it then I'm most likely copying and pasting. Don't make that difficult.

It’s been many years since I used Windows on a daily basis but that middle click scrolling feature was one of my favorite things about it. You could activate it and position the mouse cursor just right so that the page moved with your reading speed and then you could just focus your eyes along one “line” and read that way. Hands-free scrolling after it is setup.

I’ve used it just like that on Firefox on Mac and Linux for years. I generally prefer a mouse to a trackpad and it’s a way nicer interaction than using the scroll wheel to jump down the page.

Having two clipboards is a bad decision. Also, trackpad doesn't have middle button.

Yep; I often wish there were three buffers!

All trackpads I've tried support middle click via a three-finger tap.

Many also support click/tap areas, in which you define physical regions of the touchpad to correspond to button clicks.

My trackpad supports all clicks with physical buttons :-)

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Review-HP-ZBook-15-Workstation...

I disabled tap to click and all gestures except two finger scrolling.

But there are three buffers! There is a Secondary buffer as well. Emacs supports it at least, but no idea how to access it elsewhere? Top answer to this su question claims there is some old X10 cutbuffers supported in X11 as well (that I learned about just now) so maybe at least four buffers in theory?

https://superuser.com/questions/90257/what-is-the-difference...

https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Se...

As a counterpoint: I love the middle-click scroll feature and use it on all platforms I can.

When I'm reading a long article, my usual strategy is to middle-click and then move the mouse to a position that causes the page to move in time with my reading speed. The continuous movement is a lot easier for my eyes to track than occasional bursts of scrolling, and I can tweak the scroll speed by subtly adjusting the mouse position. It's a bit like cruise control for scrolling.

I'm not saying you ought to use it, but you're decrying it as "not user-friendly" and "not needed" when what you really mean is "I don't like it" and "I don't use it".

Middle click scrolling is awesome.

Windows now has clipboard history by pasting with Win+V, having the best of both worlds.

I'm sorry you can't adapt, but honesty no one cares =)

Meanwhile it is one of my favorite ever features that speeds up many tasks during my average workday. :-) It takes a bit of care though especially if there are prod-impacting sessions open.

> It takes a bit of care though especially if there are prod-impacting sessions open.

That’s why I felt it was a bad default.

> It takes a bit of care though especially if there are prod-impacting sessions open.

"Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?"

It's not a Linux feature. It's an X11 feature that is super intuitive if you've been using it for 30 years. Wayland tried to remove it but it has been begrudgingly allowed because of it's incredible usefulness since it cuts out all keyboard interaction.

Meanwhile I'm sitting here trying to cut out all my mouse interaction. I'm annoyed when I have to move my hand back to the mouse.

Of course that means I also don't have a horse in the "What should middle click do race".

> I'm annoyed when I have to move my hand back to the mouse.

You can bind a keyboard shortcut to a script that copies the primary to clipboard, then can use ctrl-v. Most apps also bind shift-insert to paste the paste buffer, so I bind shift-delete to this script, then to paste the primary it's just shift-delete then shift-insert. Here's the "script":

     xsel -p | xsel -i -b

I love middle click paste, in combination with ctrl+c/ctrl+v paste it's a second clipboard, which allows to do one kind of refactoring in between doing some other refactoring in code (as just one example).

I didn't know wayland doesn't support that either, one more thing to add to the list of things it doesn't support like screenshots, xclip, mouse/keyboard automation, etc...

it doesn’t not support it, it doesn’t set this unexpected behaviour as default

Whether it's unexpected or not depends on the user, you could as well say ctrl+v pasting in windows is unexpected if you don't know this shortcut. Middle click paste in linux is a standard feature this OS has always had

The problem being that middle click does other stuff, like opening links in new browser tabs.

Well, we can have a long discussion about what is "better" or not, but in the end it's just a preference, and also a long-standing paradigm.

It's fine to dislikes it; everyone dislikes some features (e.g. personally I really dislike autoscroll). The thing is that it's not "unexpected" because it's been like this for >30 years, since the 80s. Nor is there anything wrong with it: it's just something you can like or dislike.

Or to put it in another way: if I wanted my Unix system to behave like Windows or macOS then I'd be using Windows or macOS.

It also closes tabs, and can allow scrolling. These things are in different contexts and don't interfere. You'd need to be in a text box to middle-click-paste. It won't mess up opening a link in a new tab.

Middle click paste is very much expected - it’s been standard for at least a quarter of a century

Wayland supports screenshots. I drive it daily and use that feature many times per day.

Can't talk about the others as I don't use them.

> things it doesn't support like xclip

https://github.com/bugaevc/wl-clipboard

$ cat ~/bin/clip

    #!/bin/sh
    
    if [[ -z $WAYLAND_DISPLAY ]]; then
      xclip -selection clipboard
    else
      wl-copy
    fi

Seems like the real solution is clipboard history, which I make extensive use of on KDE and Windows. Never felt the need for middle click paste.

This doesn't cover the use-case of having unique info in both at the same time, allowing you to paste in your desired order. I have a script where I read from the primary selection, modify the text, and put it on the clipboard. I use this along with something more like a regular clipboard manager to complete a task. Combined I can highlight some text, put other info on my main clipboard to paste right away, then run my script that uses the primary selection afterward without going back to re-copy the first text.

Everything you listed works on Wayland.

Grim for screenshots, slurp for selection (similar to maim). wl-clipboard works like xclip with its wl-copy and wl-paste commands, I use it extensively in scripts. There is ydotool (not to be confused with xdotool) for kb/m automation. Highlight + middle click paste also works as expected and I use that many times a day. Primary selection is also available to wl-clipboard with a -p arg for both copy and paste.

t. actual daily Sway user for several years now

It's insane to me how much misinformation is spread about Wayland by people who just don't even try it. I guess people want to hate it.

> It's insane to me how much misinformation is spread about Wayland by people who just don't even try it. I guess people want to hate it.

I suspect it didn't work at one point and then people ditched it and have that as their memory. I tried to switch to sway, a bunch of stuff didn't work like I expected and I just switched back to i3, this was probably 3-4 years ago at this point.

I assume it's probably gotten better, so I don't go around commenting. But I fully believe people did try it and it didn't work for them (at some point) and they just ditched it.

It's the single greatest feature of any Unix desktop. Click and drag to select a section, or double click to select a word, or triple click to select a line, then middle click to paste. All without leaving the mouse or the touchpad. I buy laptops with physical mouse keys by the touchpad to middle click easily.

Yeah, I absolutely hate it. MacOS is the only system with sane handling of copying and pasting, because it doesn't have that obnoxious thing and it doesn't overload the ctrl key. Command+C doesn't interfere with ctrl+C in terminals.

Copying should always be deliberate, not something that blasts out your clipboard when you click in the wrong place and select something unintentionally. And middle click is for opening tabs.

> not something that blasts out your clipboard when you click in the wrong place and select something unintentionally

This isn't helped by the fact that the mainstream desktop OSes don't have proper clipboard managers bundled by default. Accidentally copying something isn't as big a deal when you have the most recent 200 items you've copied in an easily searchable widget.

Windows has clipboard history

Oh, I missed that! I've been mostly on Linux since before Windows 10.

FYI Window's clipbord history has better security than what desktop Linux has. For example desktop Linux currently has no way to copy an image and specify that the contents are sensitive and should not be added to the history.

Poor API design and the inability for APIs like the clipboard to evolve are part of the reason why desktop Linux's security keeps falling behind other operating systems.

How do you copy something without adding it to the clipboard history? I can't find how to do that?

Either way, I'm pretty sure it could be added if someone cared enough, e.g. by adding a new target.

It just seems to me that if someone is able to access your clipboard history you've lost already, and the entire feature seems more of a convenience thing than a security thing.

>How do you copy something without adding it to the clipboard history?

Win32: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/dataxchg/cli...

WinRT: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/uwp/api/windows.applicatio...

>Either way, I'm pretty sure it could be added if someone cared enough

That's the problem. Ironically, not enough people care about improving the security and privacy of desktop Linux.

>It just seems to me that if someone is able to access your clipboard history you've lost already

Do you not see how it could be problematic if sensitive things were logged and persisted to disk?

Edit: Some clipboard managers on Linux do have an undocumented way to do this by adding an additional format to what's being copied with a MIME type set to x-kde-passwordManagerHint and data set to "secret".

Most clipboard managers don't store to disk but in memory, AFAIK anyway.

And your link just shows some programmatic access? How do I access that as a user when I press Ctrl+C? I suppose it's "useful" for things like password managers, but since anything can read the clipboard anyway it's a very limited protection. If something is so sensitive that you're using that special programmatic way of storing it then you should be using the clipboard but an actually secure mechanism.

> And middle click is for opening tabs.

Learning that you can middle click on the back/forward/refresh buttons to open the previous/next/current page (respectively) in a new tab was a game changer for me

This is a nice thing about macOS yes, not having to use a different key in terminal.

However it's a nightmare when you use a mix of OSes every day as I do :(

It annoys me so much. I’ve tried to disable but none of the methods I’ve seen have worked for me. I use middle click to autoscroll, and to open things in new tabs or to close tabs.

Then I try to middle click autoscroll in discord or something (which works in windows!) and I’ll paste in information that I don’t intend to.

This is the first I’m hearing about Wayland fixing this. Maybe I’ll give Wayland yet another try soon.

> I've tried to disable but none of the methods I’ve seen have worked

You can fix this in the latest working firefox version with `about:config > middlemouse.paste = false` (I found this by browsing through about:config, so I'm not sure if it's decumented anywhere), but I'm not sure if that still works in the enshittified versions.

(It doesn't prevent selected text from being middle-pasted into other applications, but all my other disrupted-by-paste applications explicitly don't support middle-click-to-paste (in several cases because I deliberately wrote them that way), so I haven't gotten around to fixing that part yet.)

Yeah I’ve got it disabled in Firefox. And now that I’m looking into it more I’m seeing an option in VSCode, which is the other main place I keep pasting when trying to scroll.

But this “feature” is enabled globally across XServer and is so deeply engrained that there is no global off switch. I must find workarounds for every application in order to make my middle mouse click function as I would expect.

For an OS where everything else is so customizable this baffles me.

I so frequently encounter problems where I proofread something (or my compiler finds it for me) and I find weird words or sentence fragments that I inserted on accident while navigating a document.

Agreed, I had a hell of a time switching to Linux in part due to the difficulty in disabling this feature everywhere. I simply hate it and do not want it. It doesn't bother me if other people like it, it doesn't even bother me if it's on by default, but why is it nearly impossible to disable? It's baffling.

We're having a conversation in this thread about whether or not the feature is good, but it shouldn't matter. People who like the behavior and people who don't should be able to live side by side, without one affecting the other. The issue is that the feature should not be forced.

I don’t care about middle-click paste, but having selection auto-copy is also implemented by terminal emulators like Putty on Windows, and I wouldn’t want to miss that.

What’s problematic with the Firefox behavior is that content gets copied (pasted) that wasn’t selected by the user.

It's absolutely no different than if the actual HTML contained invisible text though.

The patch here would not help security at all. Only using control-x control-e before pasting (so that it comes into a real editor, not directly in the terminal) can help.

It’s different in that the content can change after you selected it.

Invisible text can add to what you selected, but it can’t replace it.

There’s also an argument to be made that invisible text shouldn’t be copied, though that’s harder to define precisely (you don’t want to copy “display: none”, but you want to copy scrolled-out content).

I don't think selection along is enough to copy in windows terminal or putty. You also need to right click once to trigger the copy. So the moment that triggers actual copy always requires human interaction.

No, it works immediately upon selection in Putty: https://documentation.help/PuTTY/using-selection.html

Also in Mintty: https://mintty.github.io/mintty.1.html#%03Text%20selection,%...

Conversely the select/single-click-paste is one of my favorite features of X11 it turns assembling text from various sources from a deliberate action to a natural movement. Objectively it is not that much of an improvement, it only removes two steps from normal copy paste. drag paste comes close but I never use it for some reason. But it is surprising how infuriating going back to command paste is(for example if I am on windows)

I do agree that overloading the button is terrible. I like the scroll wheel but wish there was a separate middle button. And I loathe middle button auto scroll, I regard it as a useless, user hostile feature.

A colleague of mine once destroyed a customer's system with a middle mouse button fat finger.

He was copying a listing all of the executables in various locations on the machine he'd created using ls -l, into a text document (logged in as root). Unfortunately, he accidentally middle-clicked while moving the mouse to the text editor, and it pasted everything into the shell.

Since it was mostly symlinks in the standard /bin /sbin /usr/bin /usr/sbin etc, the shell dutifully redirected garbage into each destination binary, rendering the OS unusable.

> Since it was mostly symlinks in the standard /bin /sbin /usr/bin /usr/sbin etc, the shell dutifully redirected garbage into each destination binary, rendering the OS unusable.

One must be root to be able to do that.

One of the terminal emulators I use, possibly the one that comes with lxqt that Lubuntu installs by default, pops up an "are you sure?" window showing exactly what I am about to paste whenever I middle-click-paste anything with a new-line. It can be disabled, but I found I quite like that extra check and would not mind if other applications did that.

This sounds like a one of the few good reasons to switch to Wayland, if this can really be disabled.

ffs middle click paste is the only reason to use the mouse

This is in fact my most favourite feature. Having a selection and a clipboard just feels like second nature to me and lets me copy selected text around without having to destroy the clipboard contents.

I want to share a related annoyance. I installed Linux on an old laptop. When I want to scroll using a touchpad with two finger swipe, sometimes it triggers a two finger tap, which is a middle click - which then pastes the clipboard content. Mildly frustrating when editing code or browsing chat apps.

Tried a few solutions but they didn't work on Wayland (as most of them were xinput hacks).

I didn't experience such accidental pastes when I had Windows installed.

Ha, I love it, but never figured out how to do by keyboard, even though I believe to sometimes have done it by accident.

In places where this doesn't work, clipboard history is an okay replacement (if you need multiple things "transported").

Any gesture-like feature is unintuitive if you don't take the time familiarize yourself with it. It's one of my absolute best UX improvement features in linux, I just wish it was available on other operating systems.

Conversely, the selection buffer and middle click paste are features I consider so essential to my workflow that I cannot stand any system that lacks them.

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