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

https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/07/gnome_middle_click_paste/

by beardyw • 7 months ago

67 94 7 months ago

malfist• 7 months ago

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

inyourtenement• 7 months ago

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

cdrini• 7 months ago

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".

toenail• 7 months ago

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

ChocolateGod• 7 months ago

Stop using your computer wrong

bradley_taunt• 7 months ago

Just avoid GNOME altogether. Complete mess in general.

lelanthran• 7 months ago

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

tuyiown• 7 months ago

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

_fat_santa3• 7 months ago

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.

nemomarx• 7 months ago

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.

w4rh4wk5• 7 months ago

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.

reddalo2• 7 months ago

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).

devsda• 7 months ago

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.

reddalo2• 7 months ago

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.

blibble• 7 months ago

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

MarkusWandel2• 7 months ago

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.

necrotic_comp• 7 months ago

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

MarkusWandel2• 7 months ago

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.

antonvs2• 7 months ago

They imagine that they're being more efficient.

jeffjeffbear2• 7 months ago

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.

yndoendo3• 7 months ago

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.

_fat_santa3• 7 months ago

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.

jalk• 7 months ago

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

_fat_santa3• 7 months ago

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.

blacklion5• 7 months ago

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.

orev• 7 months ago

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.

bluGill3• 7 months ago

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.

BeetleB• 7 months ago

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.

ZeroConcerns• 7 months ago

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...

robin_reala• 7 months ago

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.

cykros• 7 months ago

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

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

nialv7• 7 months ago

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.

AshamedCaptain4• 7 months ago

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

yndoendo3• 7 months ago

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.

formerly_proven• 7 months ago

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).

pjmlp2• 7 months ago

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

nottorp2• 7 months ago

Gnome has options?

hagbard_c• 7 months ago

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.

YeGoblynQueenne2• 6 months ago

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

sliken2• 7 months ago

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.

internet_points• 7 months ago

someone opened an issue.

must be a slow news day.

dilap• 7 months ago

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...)

jeffjeffbear2• 7 months ago

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.

AshamedCaptain4• 7 months ago

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

Andrex• 7 months ago

"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.

bilekas• 7 months ago

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.

yjftsjthsd-h• 7 months ago

"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?

Y_Y4• 7 months ago

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?

HugoTea2• 7 months ago

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.

seanhunter• 7 months ago

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

mid-kid2• 7 months ago

they were using hyperbole

HugoTea2• 7 months ago

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

nottorp2• 7 months ago

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.

bigbadfeline3• 7 months ago

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.

vemv• 7 months ago

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.

antonvs2• 7 months ago

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.

greatgib• 7 months ago

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.

sliken2• 7 months ago

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.

juancn• 7 months ago

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.

ndiddy• 7 months ago

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.

Hizonner• 7 months ago

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

bigbadfeline3• 7 months ago

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."

qbrass• 7 months ago

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

jaywee• 7 months ago

"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.

ChrisArchitect• 7 months ago

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

mid-kid2• 7 months ago

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

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

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