Thread | Brutkey

Hot take: good riddance. I dislike the middle click thing. Trips me up all the time as someone who accidentally clicks it when scrolling.

I think the right move is to make this (undoubtedly useful to some) behavior opt-in, not opt-out.

A lot of the gripes I see are just people being mad because GNOME makes choices they don't like. I don't understand why people write like this about GNOME, if you don't like it don't use it, your emotions make you look petty, etc etc.

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

Federico Mena Quintero
@federicomena@mstdn.mx

@vkc@linuxmom.net Middle-click paste is one of those "weird Unix" interaction things that really requires other "weird Unix" things to work well, namely focus-follows-mouse and the concept of an X11-like selection mechanism.

It broke when scrollwheels took over the middle button.

It broke when you slipped while bringing a window to the front, thus causing a selection in that other window, and thus losing the selection from the first one that you intended to middle-paste.

I loved it in 1996; not anymore.