Gnome dev gives fans of Linux's middle-click paste the middle finger | Hacker News Reader

Gnome dev gives fans of Linux's middle-click paste the middle finger

theregister.com

67 pointsbeardyw94 comments

The article makes it seem worse than it really is. All they seem to be doing is moving that functionality from being the default to an option that you enable.

Personally I heavily rely on the middle click to paste, especially with my docker workflows. Rather than having to click "CTRL+SHIFT+C" then "CTRL+SHIFT+V" every time, I just know whatever is highlighted will get pasted when I hit the middle click button. It's a subtle difference that saves maybe 1-2 seconds but combine that over the course of months and all of a sudden I've saved myself an hour with more efficient copy/paste.

Well, the source article is from El Reg, where objectivity is something to eventually strive for, but if it gets in the way of clicks, facts are definitely not a friend.

And, somehow, that strategy seems to keep working decade after decade. Yeah, I don't get it either...

After I’d been in the firing line for a couple of Reg articles I started realising that yes, they don’t let much stand in the way of a good story. They still write a good story though, it’s just slightly more tenuously tethered to reality than I’d originally imagined.

At least you know what you're getting with El Reg, unlike Very Serious Publications written for Very Serious People. The average article in CIO is also densely-packed bullshit, just polished up more.

It IS labeled "Opinion" in their defense...

But yea, El Reg is never where you go for objectivity.

Not a "normal" option though. They plan to hide it away inside `gsettings` so only power user who already knows about middle-click paste will be able to find it and enable it. This completely destroys discoverability.

And a couple years later it is removed as only a minority used it.

I use both because they use to different software registries to store the information. This allows the CTRL+C content to be different than the middle mouse highlight.

I cannot stand the Windows middle mouse user experience and always prefer the middle highlight and paste method.

I find having two clipboards at the same time to be super handy and I literally use it all the time. Yes, KDE also has a clipboard manager that allows me to do Meta+V and paste from history, but I use the two clipboards way more frequently and it is easier/faster to, anyway.

(Formally, it makes handwavy sense: Having a clipboard with a history is basically a pushdown automaton, but having two of these in one box is not a PDA any more - it's something categorically more powerful, equivalent to a turing machine iirc).

>> I find having two clipboards at the same time to be super handy and I literally use it all the time.

Wouldn't it be great if we could have multiple named registers that we could paste from and even modify?

(vim enters the chat)

You can customise it via Powertoys or some other utilities, though.

Gnome options have a habit of disappearing. I've followed the project from its conception to the current iteration, used v1 and v2 interchangeably with KDE and eventually moved to Xmonad with whatever applications I need. Gnome 1 was hackish and geeky, Gnome 2 polished off the hackishness and turned an ugly but promising duckling into a fully-functional duck. Then came v3 and with that the opinionated paring-down of options started for real. It became almost obligatory to install one or more 'gnome tweaks' tools to make things work as they used to. Strangely enough this quest for 'simplicity' has forced many Gnome users to (re)turn to hackish tools like gnome-tweaks to make their computers works like they want as opposed to the way the Gnome team insists they should work.

That's a very Windows-y/ Apple-y way to treat one's users. Disappoint. I use KDE though.

Sure. But it's a depreciation and there's numerous similar settings that are only available by tweaking settings manually or using gnome-tweaks. Right now nearly every linux app supports select with the left button and paste with the middle. It's fast, useful, doesn't require a keyboard, etc. Amusingly I've seen various logins block control-v, but middle click works. God forbid you use a password safe with your bank login.

When you use gnome-tweaks there's a ton of "WARNING you may break things" and of course anything off the default path is likely to receive zero testing.

Personally I find middle click to paste one of the differentiators between MacOS, Windows, and Linux. I'm pretty surprised it's not more common. I was amused the iterm2 added select without having to type control-c.

I have it the opposite way. Moving my right hand from the keyboard to the mouse doesn’t save me time - so as with most things: YMMV

Having mouse paste as an option doesn’t remove the fact that keyboard paste is also an option, so that’s really immaterial to the topic.

Are you sure? Have you actually timed this, or are you just using your subjective impression of time.

In Human factors engineering we have known for decades that some things that seem faster are really slower when you time it. We are taught early to never trust what someone says about time, always find an objective way to measure it.

It is why I (right-handed) was tфught by my first boss on first job in 2000s to use left hand for the mouse: secondary hand for secondary task (I'm not designer, artist or pro-gamer, so keyboard is primary tool).

Now I have a big problem with this: there is no good left-handed mouses on the market anymore, and symmetric mouses has right-handed buttons (and no thumb buttons like forward-backward or left-handed side). Buttons can be swapped in OS, but it messed up remote access like VNC or RDP to systems without swapped buttons... So, buttons must be swapped physically. No luck.

Most of the useful keyboard shortcuts are chordable from the left hand. Left mouse is inconvenient for that. I'm lefty and stuck using left mouse periodically due to injuries and I don't love it but it's tolerable. For the mouse situation I just stick to symmetric 3-button mice and never swap buttons so I can change hands or have a coworker use the mouse uninterrupted.

I also mouse left-handed, but it never occurred to me to swap the buttons from the right-handed configuration. It's always been a practical thing. The only mice I'm likely to have within reach at any point are probably right-handed, so I just had to learn that way. Left click with middle finger, right click with index.

I would kill for a true ambi five-button mouse to replace my old Microsoft Intellimouse, but I've run into the same problem, they just don't seem to exist anymore. All five button mice on the market either have both buttons 4 and 5 on the left side for righties, or have a grotesquely unbalanced design in some other way.

> I would kill for a true ambi five-button mouse to replace my old Microsoft Intellimouse, but I've run into the same problem, they just don't seem to exist anymore.

I was going to say Steelseries Sensei but it looks like those have been discontinued.

Looks like Steelserise Sensei Ten is ambi, symmetrical, with two additional buttons on each side. But not on a cheap side. If you can find one. It is still present on site, but I cannot find places which sell it.

not enough buttons maybe but these have a version called "L LEFT"

https://www.logitech.com/en-us/shop/p/m650-signature-wireles...

It has one problem: buttons not swapped physically! Yes, leftmost button is primary one (first), and rightmost is secondary (third).

I have this one and use it, with software swapping, but each time I login to remote computer via RDP I need to un-swap in settings again and then back :-(

It is striking, that Logitech forgot how to make proper left-handed mouse. Their older models (discontinued for long time) were perfectly Ok!

Also, it very small for my hand. But better than nothing.

Fwiw this is how cars work when you change to a country that drives on the other side of the road. It seems like mirroring the car would make sense. But really everything is shifted to the opposite side as a translation without reflection. It's easier to manufacture, but as many of you will know and is apparent to all rental agencies, adapting doesn't take long for the average driver, even on manual transmission.

There is one good lefty (not symmetrical) mouse now: 3D Connexion CadMouse Pro Wireless Left, but it costs 144€ in Europe (with VAT). Madness.

My trouble is I really do want an ambi mouse, not a lefty mouse, since I like to switch back and forth (and always game right-handed.) Maybe I should just get one of each..

I could live with (rather big) ambi mouse. But typically ambi mouses are very budget ones :(

Well, I usually use the mouse to select text. And then I usually use the mouse to put the cursor precisely where I need to paste. So even in a Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V workflow, I'm using the mouse as much.

If you're using something like vim or emacs then yeah I would agree with you but for something like docker commands, there's just no easy way to copy a specific container ID without using the mouse (if there is let me know lol).

My logic is if your hand is already on the mouse, it's going to be faster to paste with a mouse than your keyboard.

> for something like docker commands, there's just no easy way to copy a specific container ID without using the mouse

Some terminals have a mode where you can move the cursor around the history, and allow searching / copying / pasting. Alacritty and tmux come to mind, others may also implement something similar.

It’s still annoying to move. The only way it’s practical is if you can store a regex to match container ids or whatever, and quickly fetch it

I do something that, but just parse the output of `docker ps` or whatever. Since each line has the same format it's very straightforward.

oh heh I do

    docker ps -a | grep image_name_or_whatever | awk1 | pbcopy (or xclip on linux)

(awk1 is an alias for awk "{print $1}" and I just have awk1-10 or whatever)

to grab the container id and put it on the clipboard

Gnome has options?

Haven't used Linux in forever, but middle-click to paste was like the one thing that consistently worked everywhere. So it makes some sense that someone want to break it somewhere. With enough fingers meddling all conventions are broken. Wisdom of the crowds. Democracy.

(Actually I have been playing with Omarchy recently a tiny bit, inspired by the absolutely devestatingly bad macOS update. Initial tire-kicking was very positive. They had a "universal copy-paste" feature that still seemed WIP at the time...i.e. didn't work everywhere...)

> Haven't used Linux in forever, but middle-click to paste was like the one thing that consistently worked everywhere.

That's because it was an X11 thing, and everyone used X11.

X11 doesnt really define those things. Policy, not mechanism.

X heavily relied on the primary and secondary selections for performing operations in lieu of an explicit clipboard. It is built into the protocol. The only policy is where that paste binding defaulted to.

X doesn't even enforce primary or secondary selections, they have no special meaning to the protocol. What is built on the protocol is this mechanism to do clipboard-like things. Even how many actual clipboard thingies you have is policy and not builtin into the protocol.

While X11 didn't define it, the defaults were such that it would be harder to write a program that didn't do that then one that did in many cases.

Not at all. Unless you specifically coded this handler for the middle button and wrote code for fetching selections and all, you would not get this behavior. It would be easier for the middle button to do nothing.

You may be thinking of toolkits like Gtk+ or Qt which implement this behavior, but it is really just a convention shared by many desktop toolkits rather than anything defined by X11.

"Everywhere" except Windows and Mac, which can make transitioning more friction-y than it needs to be. As Windows users continue to exodus it makes sense to me to tune onboarding for brand-new users from other OSes instead of other Linux distros.

I'm very glad the option will remain for existing users.

I've never liked this take that "Linux should be like Windows to take windows' market"

It really isn't that black and white. Windows is more popular because it's forced on the majority of people, not because the way they do things is inherently better. Linux has and will do it's own thing and Windows will do whatever the trend to chase is.

I'm happy with that.

> "Everywhere" except Windows and Mac,

I read that as "everywhere on Linux", so those are irrelevant.

> which can make transitioning more friction-y than it needs to be.

What friction is added by it being possible to middle click paste?

From the MR comments:

> If we assume the Linux desktop has 4% market share, and assume the highly improbable fact that all of those 4% know how to use middle click paste and prefer it over the alternative autoscrolling, that's still 96% of users that are used to environments where autoscrolling is available and middle click paste doesn't exist

I don't know why they're using familiarity as an argument when GNOME has intentionally behaved completely differently from the Windows/Mac desktop for the past 15 years. I'm sure that having to launch software by clicking an unlabelled button on the top-left of the screen and then clicking the dots in the dock that appears on the bottom, or not having a visible overview of the windows onscreen without switching to fullscreen "activities mode", or not having any application status icons, or not being able to minimize windows, all cause more user confusion than middle click paste.

Of course all of this is completely fine. It's great that people are trying out new ways to use a computer, and I'm sure that there's lots of people that prefer the GNOME workflow. It's just that when you already have to re-learn how to use a desktop in order to use GNOME, I don't see the point in acting like middle click paste is a step too far.

Edit: I also saw an interesting point made by a KDE developer on the Linux Reddit board: https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1q4viq9/disable_prim...

> Having an option is fine; we do in Plasma. They can have any default they want too, I don't care.

> What's bad is this MR doing it at a GTK level. It's that lack of even thinking about what inconsistencies that would cause for GTK apps running anywhere outside gnome and other toolkits running on Gnome that comes across quite badly.

> gsettings-desktop-schemas will be pulled in [on other desktops] as it's a reverse dep of many other things, including xdg-desktop-portal-gtk, which is required for use on all desktops to avoid having messed up GTK fonts in your flatpak apps.

Wait, so it's important to be "familiar" to the 96 percent of users who don't use your software?

Math isn't among the strong points of Gnome devs. Neither is honesty. If they were honest they would write the truth, like:

"100% of Linux desktop users love middle-button paste, but we want to muddy the waters for those 25% of them who are stupid enough to use Gnome, our sponsors will reward us for it."

I wholly dis^H^H^Happrove of what you say—but won't defend to the death your right to say it.

(Apologies to not Voltaire)

I am mostly on Windows now, but once upon a time I was a GNOME fanboy, did some minor contributions to Gtkmm, the most relevant one was an article on The C/C++ User's Journal raising awarness of its existence.

When using GNU/Linux VMs with desktop experience, I never use GNOME unless I am not able to change to XFCE, KDE, or even my oldie WindowMaker. e.g. I don't own the VM.

No idea what is their supposed target audience nowadays.

Yes, you don't make that 4 percent bigger unless you get people who don't use Linux to use Linux.

> Yes, you don't make that 4 percent bigger unless you get people who don't use Linux to use Linux.

And you get people to use Linux by removing features that make Linux attractive in the first place? The mess that is Windows clipboard and cut/paste is what drove me to Linux when I started with it, and I've heard the same from other people too.

"Users of W don't know X" leads to "Let make our system like W" which is a ruse of an argument, that was pointed out already.

I encourage you to read the grandparent of your comment and specifically this quote (from ndiddy):

"I don't know why they're using familiarity as an argument when GNOME has intentionally behaved completely differently from the Windows/Mac desktop for the past 15 years."

> "we have to cater to what 96% of users know" Indeed. Just recently saw a talk "Are we stuck with the same Desktop UX forever? | Ubuntu Summit 25.10" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1fZTOjd_bOQ) where Scott Jenson (Apple/Google UX) laments we stopped innovating on Desktop.

Such appeal to conformity is indeed quite sad from GNOME.

Unix oldtimer here (first exposure: 1987). A lot of copy/pasting is at the shell prompt. Aside from being super lightweight - just select something in previous output, e.g. a file path, middle click, and done - what about the key bindings? All the world uses ^C for copy, but that already does something conflicting at the Unix shell prompt.

I have to admit that I do feel like an oldtimer though. What I do at the shell prompt, others do in VS Code, and probably 10x faster once they're good at the GUI. So maybe super-lightweight copy/paste at the shell prompt just doesn't matter that much any more.

That is also the one good thing about Window's commandline, you use right click there to copy and paste which is nice. The rest sucks.

I cannot stand the Windows user experience in their command line. The Linux method actually has to software registries that allow for different content to be copied and pasted.

Oh I used CTRL+C to copy something but I need something copied first, highlight paste with middle mouse and paste with CTRL+P.

On Windows you must destroy the content of the CTRL+C and replace it with what the middle mouse can do, go back to the first source to copy and paste again.

You want a clipboard manager/history. You are using middle button paste as a work around for how hard it is to find a good clipboard manager (I'm not sure if one exists...)

I have and use all three on Linux. I only use Windows at work the IT is strict.

Tangential - what do people do faster in vscode than on the terminal ?

The whole "integrated development" experience. Take it or leave it, but old farts like me go all the way back to poring over code on printouts since your only window into it was one file at a time in an 80x25 terminal - not terminal window, actual terminal or, by then, terminal emulator.

That does affect later habits like, for example, hating the information overload from syntax highlighting. And don't even get me started on auto-indent.

Whereas younger colleagues, whose habits were formed in the era of much more sophisticated tools, have dozens of files open in tabs and can follow, say, a "where is this defined" or "where is this driven" (this is RTL code, not normal software) in an instant. Keep in mind some oldtimers had really fancy emacs setups that could do that, and vi users had things like ctags.

They imagine that they're being more efficient.

I've always hated middle-click-paste, but trying to turn it off quickly rears a bigger issue, it's somehow deeply embedded in Linux, disabling it in Gnome would leave it enabled in other places like FireFox, which leads to searching how to disable it, which leads to recompiling the kernel, at least that's the rabbit hole I went down last time. I have no opinion on whether it should be default or not, but I wish it was easier to control globally.

Wut? Recompiling the kernel is absolutely not required for changing the behaviour of middle mouse paste.

Genuinely if you know how to disable it globally I would be interested to know.

they were using hyperbole

Well it's Gnome, next step is to remove right click.

They will first make the proposal as a tik tok video, since they seem to avoid anything that will speed up interaction, like reading or having sooo many buttons on your input devices.

> Well it's Gnome, next step is to remove right click.

Remove Gnome ASAP because after they remove your ability to control anything on your computer you won't be able to remove it anymore.

Gnome devs always had the attitude that they decide for the users, nothing to see here.

Stop using your computer wrong

One person opening a merge request does not signify gnome giving the middle finger to people. Especially since its not merged

The headline says “Gnome dev” not just “Gnome”.

Yeah, but the lead makes it seem like an organisational decision:

> Ever since Linux got a graphical desktop, you could middle-click to paste – but if GNOME gets its way, that's going away soon, and from Firefox too.

But who knows, maybe it is a team decision, I don't know the internals or Jordan Petridis' role outside of "gnome dev".

[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46513010

> Feature I don't use must be removed! I unsupportedly claim that it is bad, and will zealously advocate for changing it. It's existed for a long time, but I shan't acknowlege why!

Why are people like this? Will Gnome reach apotheosis when they have removed all buttons and boxes and you just get a shiny rounded rectangle to admire?

This is one of the toppest things in Linux desktop.

I agree that it can be teached more widely but then it is so fucking convenient, I think that 4/5 of my need of copy-paste are efficiently done like this.

Gnome has really this problem of young crappy devs that want to make a name by themselves by "breaking" something, like Google style. If they can't disrupt, then there is no fame.

And I would easily guess that this guy is running is Linux-gnome desktop from a MacBook...

Remind me when the idiots currently in charge at Ubuntu suddenly decided to put the closing buttons for windows in the upper left corner to mimic OSX. They knew better... then it was the beginning of the downfall for Ubuntu that no sane person will use anymore.

Similarly gnome-terminal used to have "new terminal" as the first option in the menu of a terminal. Then it got moved down to 6th item, then in the newer versions removed completely.

Very frustrating.

You can tell someone was angry by how often they wrote [sic] in the quotes

Just avoid GNOME altogether. Complete mess in general.

The introduction of hamburger menus broken many of the Alt+Letter shortcut workflows. Even to this day, GNOME applications are hard to fully control via keyboard.

I'll never understand how this can be deemed acceptable from an accessibility standpoint.

I also think that the absence of a title bar is so much annoying.

They wanted to copy macOS, but macOS somehow used to do it better (at least before Tahoe).

For all of GNOME's faults, it's provided me a much better experience than other DE's. XFCE and others don't handle fractional scaling nearly as gracefully as GNOME does. KDE is probably the closest but you still have the issue of running GTK/QT apps and they all look very different and jarring on the desktop.

Do QT apps look better on Gnome? I figured you'd run into the issue either way you went unless you can keep to only "native" uis.

You generally don’t need any QT apps. Whereas using KDE without any GTK apps is tough. Even Firefox uses gtk.

that's pretty easy

unfortunately much harder to avoid all GTK3+ apps

especially the cursed open/save dialogs, which are so bad I'd prefer the Windows 3.1 dialog

Seconded. They are designing for a theoretical user that does not exist.

I not sure if I should be relieved or worried about my newfound non-existence.

I should really thank them though.

I disliked the black bars release(v3 I think) so much that I moved back to KDE and then also tried lxqt, xfce and i3 but never GNOME. If not for that release I would have probably been stuck with only GNOME and never try other options.

Me too. Nowadays I think Cinnamon (Linux Mint's default DE) has also a super good UX, it reminds me a lot of old school GNOME.

Cinnamon and MATE are the directions I’d have preferred for Gnome to go. It’s a good thing devs like this aren’t designing cars. I really don’t want to steer my car with the foot pedals and throttle with my hands.

someone opened an issue.

must be a slow news day.

As of lately I was thinking, with AI coding I could pick a distro of choice, and tweak it at will in all aspects.

Not that it wasn't possible before of course, but OS/distro dev across the entire stack surely spans an insane breadth and depth of knowledge.

Since the advent of LLMs, I've used them to juice up my Linux setup significantly.

I was already using Ubuntu with Gnome (the "flashback" version) and the XMonad tiling WM, but I've since ditched Gnome and switched to LXQt, and am pretty happy with it.

Then I installed Nix to override Ubuntu's aggressive Snap usage for applications like Firefox. (You can try to install it some other way, it'll just silently revert no matter how hard you try to configure it not to.)

Next step will be to eliminate Ubuntu entirely, because it's so focused on "end user" friendliness, it creates a terrible experience for anyone trying to customize their setup.

I'm very aware that I'm moving further and further off the "mainstream", but if the mainstream means "you will accept all our poorly thought-out and inefficient UI decisions", then there's not really a downside to that.

For me it always felt weird, it surprises me that it survived on-by-default for this long.

It's one of those remnants of ancient UX, like focus on hover.

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