X.Org, to whom it may concern: I'm writing to suggest that Xorg's middle-mouse pasting should be an optional feature, not an unchangeable behavior.
The rationale is simple: Middle-mouse pasting is only beneficial to users who know that it exists. For everyone else, it's a liability. Say for example a user is writing a document, scrolling through it, and accidentally pastes text without knowing it. The pasted text might contain sensitive/private information. The user submits the document somewhere, and people read it. It's more likely than you think. This isn't simply a matter of mouse scroll wheels that click too easily. Laptop touchpads are known to paste accidentally too. Even 2-button emulation is a liability, if the user doesn't remember to deliberately avoid pressing both buttons at once. Solution: Middle-mouse pasting would be great as a setting that can be enabled/disabled by 'xset' on the command line. Please let me know if this would be simple to implement. Thanks - Elie P.S. Current workarounds involve either: - completely disabling the middle mouse button - blocking the feature in specific apps only - scripts that continuously delete Xorg's clipboard every half-second We can do better. P.P.S. I would bet that desktop linux distros would disable middle-mouse pasting by default, if they could. Many users are new to Linux, and are used to absent-mindedly clicking the scroll wheel while scrolling. Hardcore coders can always re-enable the feature via 'xset'.
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