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Comment by quchen | Hacker News Reader

Before this thread starts to become a rant about Gnome developers again, I'd like to mention that I find middle-mouse pasting annoying and I would appreciate an option to disable it in X. What the Gnome devs did was just inverting the setting without providing an option for it, which is a pretty awful idea.

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> What the Gnome devs did was just inverting the setting without providing an option for it, which is a pretty awful idea.

Gnome devs don't like to give the user options.

Agreed in that this needs to be an option. I'm using the middle mouse paste very often, it's such a nice and easy thing to have.. Do i want a "text context" menu? No. I'd enable the mouse-click paste again..

I'm interested in why you'd like to see an option to disable it, considering that you could just as well not click the button. Is there something in your daily workflow that leads to lots of accidental presses?

My mouse has a scroll wheel which also doubles as the middle button when clicked. When scrolling through text, a little too much pressure and you end up pasting code all over the place. It's a monumental pain in the ass when dealing with code and requires minute checking all of changes in case an errant paste makes into the repository.

> My mouse has a scroll wheel which also doubles as the middle button when clicked. When scrolling through text, a little too much pressure and you end up pasting code all over the place.

I would submit that this is not a problem with middle click to paste, but rather a problem with a bad hardware design for the particular mouse you are utilizing. The true solution is to replace the badly designed mouse with a better mouse.

Hm, I had the same problem now with several mice. I mean scroll wheel = button seems to be pretty standard this days. And I even fight with the same trouble often enough - accidentally pasting stuff into code without noticing. The only problem with disabling the middle-mouse button for me would be that it's the only way to copy-paste from consoles. Which again already doesn't work when trying to paste into the browser so I already must often do something like - copy with middle mouse button from console to some texteditor, copy it there into that other buffer - and then paste in the browser. Not to mention the regular guessing about which application will work with middle mouse button and which won't and which won't work with the other copy-paste. It's rather a mess right now in X.

Most mice I've used require a substantial amount of pressure on the scroll wheel in order to depress it and count as a click. Additionally, there's a noticeable (both tactile and audible) response when a click on the scroll wheel happens.

If the mice you're trying don't have those, and it's very easy for you to inadvertently press the middle button, then that does seem like a pretty major design flaw. If you're always buying mice from the same manufacturer, perhaps investigating a different brand is in order?

If getting better-designed hardware isn't an option, then I guess the alternatives would be improving your finger control so that you don't accidentally click the button while scrolling, or disabling it in software so that it doesn't matter. Honestly though disabling it and missing out on that functionality entirely seems like the worst of those choices.

I also loved the feature once madly, just lost that love at some point. Maybe I'm just more used to pressing middle-mouse all the time for other reasons as Blender uses it for navigation (as well as other 3D tools I'm working with).

Gnome terminal accepts Shift-Control-C and Shift-Control-V for copy/paste.

Buy a better mouse, a B100 is just $13 at Newegg. The cheapest is almost $5 and it'll probably work just fine.

Middle mouse button is used for a lot things - paste, new tab click, scroll. If your mouse is prone to misclicks it's a shitty mouse. Disable middle button at all then.

I've accidentally pasted lines with --username --password into source files because of a sensitive scroll wheel... That's pretty embarrassing in code review.

Wouldn't your own personal pre-peer-review review have caught that?

Plus you should be checking diffs before committing anything.

It's generally a good idea to use git add -p, even without a sensitive scroll wheel.

In most web browsers, middle click closes tabs, opens links in new tabs, and on Windows, starts an automatic "scroll follows mouse" mode. I seem to remember that at one point, Chromium on Linux would interpret middle clicking on an unclickable part of the page to mean "interpret the text stored in the clipboard as a URL or search term, and go to it." Imagine the fun I had with the occasional misclick of a link before I found an extension that implements Windows-like middle click scroll.

The only time I ever intentionally use middle click paste is when using the terminal where, you know, Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V are already taken. An option to disable middle click paste for everything but terminal emulators could only be a benefit, removing a rare but ever present source of confusion and mistakes.

> Chromium on Linux would interpret middle clicking on an unclickable part of the page to mean "interpret the text stored in the clipboard as a URL or search term, and go to it." Imagine the fun I had with the occasional misclick of a link before I found an extension that implements Windows-like middle click scroll

Opera does that, too, and I love it. No need to focus the address bar after selecting text, just click and go :)

For me: a touchpad as the primary pointer input device. I use two fingers for scrolling and a two-finger tap as middle mouse button clicks. I really like that setup for web browsing, but it frequently messes up code in the editor.

I guess it depends on the hardware used – I mostly use one of these external Thinkpad-like keyboards with three dedicated buttons and a track point and never accidentally middle-paste.

But I guess if middle-click never does anything useful for you (Windows, Mac), you might prioritise it less in your hardware design :|

It does do useful things on Windows. There are the browser behaviors I mentioned above. Most image editors use middle click to pan, and I think 3D modeling programs use it to rotate and pan as well. It's only in dedicated text boxes that middle click does nothing useful, but we're all so used to Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V that we don't have any desire to use that button for pasting.

Certainly, but those are all related to holding the middle mouse button and moving the mouse, not clicking per se. Similar behaviour is available on X with something like:

  	Option		"EmulateWheel"		"on"
  	Option		"EmulateWheelButton"	"2"
  	Option		"XAxisMapping"		"6 7"
  	Option		"YAxisMapping"		"4 5"

Which is exactly the way I scroll: Hold the middle button and move the trackpoint.

I was going to respond to a link detailing how to disable it, but was shocked to find no answers after a few minutes of Googling. I like the feature but absolutely agree with you: there should at least be a way to disable it in xorg.conf.

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