Bravo Michael for continuing to farm bullshit drama with clickbait headlines on the most inane topics like “how my DE handles pasting text”
Does Gnome have a proper file picker yet?
You mean “once again”. They had one, but screwed it up. Who the fuck types in the file save dialog expecting it to perform SEARCH?
Not having that in Windows is jarring.
I don’t use GNOME or Firefox though so maybe who cares.
If that’s not optional, I’d have to leave Firefox for something else.
It is only going to be disabled-by-default
I can live with this one, as long as they let us pick the function
The default paste action is pretty much the only thing preventing anyone from picking a different function for the button. That’s the the biggest reason for reversing the default behaviour.
as someone new to linux i don’t get it. if you have your hand in ctrl-c anyway ctrl-v is right there?
@Reisen Among other things, it’s useful in terminals where the standard ctrl-c/ctrl-v send a control signal rather than copy/paste. Most terminals nowadays have some other copy/paste shortcut so it’s less important now, but a lot of us still find it convenient.
It’s like a second, separate clipboard. You “copy” text to this one by simply selecting it, then “paste” from it by middle-clicking.
There’s also shift+insert if you want a keyboard shortcut. I remapped it to meh+v.
I never used it, but TIL…
Urgh, I use it at least 300 times a day.
From the other thread it seems it’ll just be disabled by default, and enableable if wanted
Same, and I have done so since the mid-90’s. It’s muscle memory at this point.
never even knew that was a thing until a couple months ago, found it by accident. for 15-ish years I’ve just used a programmable mouse button for paste. still don’t know what i should do with that button now since middle click can paste.
Welcome to the future! … Or the past, not sure, but welcome.
From the other thread it seems it’ll just be disabled by default, and enableable if wanted
Yeah, the title of this post seems to make that fairly clear. Still annoying though.
Maybe GNOME and Mozilla will consider a separate download/package where it is enabled by default, like gnome-desktop-middle-click-to-paste-enabled :D
Sure but youre probably aware that the vast majority of users dont, and for those users its a usability issue.
If you’re referring to touch screen users, then I don’t see how not having copy/pasting work when you plug in a mouse benefits them normally when they don’t have mice plugged in.
Well, I guess I’d have to use a fork of… oh, wait a second, I’ve already been alternating between Pale Moon, SeaMonkey, LibreWolf, and Firefox along with Tor and Links.
I just would be using less of Firefox and more of LibreWolf. And when Ladybird is ready, I’ll use that and dillo.
Except Ladybird is ran by a right wing guy 😞
I’d suggest looking at Servo or old KHTML if you want a true alternative
I’m still looking forward to a new browser engine, separate from Chrome and Gecko. The politics can be debated later, but we need something to break the Google stranglehold. Let’s just be real about this, KHTML, Dillo, Links, and Goanna aren’t doing it. Opera & Vivaldi aren’t going to resurrect Presto.
So what then, other than Ladybird?
servo?
Waterfox?
Waterfox is Gecko. I still agree with the comment that mentions it is written by a right-winger. I rather root for Servo, especially because Ladybird is just another web engine written C. Memory safety vulnerabilities are the largest represented class of vulnerabilities discovered every year. Servo being fully written in Rust is a good thing for its security, as long as they also design a strong sandboxing/isolation strategy on all OS platforms.
You do you, that’s fine with me. Waterfox is still an option for other people to consider when they’re looking for an alternative. Like I would consider any new option that presents itself to me: I’m not married to my browser, at least in my eyes it is merely a tool :)
I tried Waterfox and didnt really get it? Why use it over for example Zen or Librewolf? It just seemed way to close to Firefox but like with a couple of preinstalled extensions. Idk, just wasn’t for me.
My browser(s) is just a tool. I use many browsers for different things. I wish there were good alternatives to the main browser engines (Gecko, Blink, WebKit), but I am fine with just using good derivative browsers like Librewolf, Mullvad, Cromite, etc.
Or you could change the preference to enable the feature again.
Didn’t know if it was possible for open source to disappoint me, but here we are. Instead of removing it entirely make it an option so the people can decide.
That’s exactly what’s happening.
Middle click paste is extremely useful. Why would anyone want to disable it?
There are programs that use the middle mouse button but also support pasting from clipboard. I’ve been annoyed at work plenty of times when I’m trying to translate across a canvas but accidentally paste a random node of text. Bonus points if it contains some kind of password that was still in your clipboard. I don’t think it’s a good default.
I accidentally hit middle click and paste my passwords into discord 30 times a day, it needs to go
Sounds like your doing passwords wrong.
You know that you shouldn’t use Discord, right?
It can conflict with some programs. A lot of modern design programs make use of middle click drags to move around a canvas.
That caused problems for me and it took me days to realize it was middle click paste causing the issue of all these random segments of text appearing all over the canvas.
It was also annoying to disable. I was using Chromium at the time and you simply cannot disable it, even by disabling it in Gnome. I had to use Firefox exclusively when using that design program since at least Firefox has a hidden option to disable it.
As a software developer working closely with designers this has caused some nightmare scenarios
My mouse’s middle click is easy to hit accidentally, and so I often paste stuff on accident, I just wish I could disable it. The “select to copy” doesn’t work for me either, since I often absentmindedly select things while I’m reading.
Calling it a ‘dumpster fire’ is a bit dramatic.
I think I’d happily describe the multiple clipboard situation in Linux as a dumpster fire…
It’s awkwardly ‘solved’ by clipboard managers merging clipboards but it’s still wonky. Even for somebody who has been using Linux as a desktop for many years I occasionally find myself annoyed by it.
At this point I think I’d prefer “copy” to be an affirmative action rather than something that is done automatically. It makes pasting over existing text much easier.
Yeah the 2 clipboards are a mess.
I actually once locked me out of ALL my accounts because of them.
As someone who likes the middle-click to do mouse relative scrolling, I would be OK with this being configurable on a per-application level.
I don’t think it really makes sense as a “standard”. Blender will never use middle click as paste, for example.
Middle click to paste the X PRIMARY selection predates Blender.
Yes, I do know how old Blender is.
Right,
But just because it was a standard doesn’t mean it made sense as a standard. So when 99% of applications don’t care to adopt the standard, it really only makes sense to let the application space decide what to do with middle click and to fall back on the user’s system configuration if it’s unspecified (which can still be paste if you want it to be imo)
Not once in over 20 years of daily Firefox usage have I used this feature.
Ill be very happy when that day comes. Its one of the first things I need to search for how to disable every time i setup a new machine. To me, middle click has always been panning a canvas, and rectangle selecting text in editors. Its always super jarring having it paste text on new gnome machines
wait where does that get overridden? its going back a few years but when I was trying blender I used middle click paste and I don’t think I had any issues with it affecting whatever middle click does by default in blender
Middle click paste sucks, I keep accideE&4nry!NAnY6Yfntally activating it in the middle of my documents which is bad when I have st6SFMzZkTR7!b^yuff like passwords copied and don’t notice, so good
KDE and Gnome already have toggles for it, though Gnome’s is in gnome-tweaks because Gnome hates exposed settings.
I’d support unifying behavior between toolkits and apps to provide users with a single point to set their preference, but I use this feature a hundred times a day. I’d also like it to remain the default; *nix desktops should have their own flavor instead of just copying Mac OS or Windows, and middle-click paste has been a part of that flavor for 40 years.
No hunter2 in there, this is fake.
