Opinion 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. More proof, if you will, that the traditional keyboard and multi-button mouse config is boring legacy tech to the hipsters in charge these days. GNOME developer Jordan Petridis has submitted the code to remove middle-click paste behavior from GNOME defaults, which he considers "an X11ism." The merge request concludes "Goodbye X11." It's not just in GNOME – he's additionally filed bug 1747207 against Firefox, also proposing to remove this behavior. There, he says: The spelling and punctuation errors are in the original, but they aren't the only mistake: it doesn't dump the clipboard. The clipboard is a separate thing. Middle-clicking pastes any currently selected text at the insertion point, including in a terminal emulator, without affecting the clipboard. That's why we like it. For instance, you can select and copy the title of a webpage, then select the URL, then switch to another window, paste the title with Ctrl+V, and then paste the URL with a middle-click, without two round trips between the apps. There is one element of truth to this proposal, though. Middle-click to paste is not as well-known as it should be, which is why we wrote about how to use the middle button in 2023. However, this is a very long-standing feature. Linux.com published an article about using it in 2004. A 2005 Mozilla bug says: "Middle-click paste is the default behavior on Unix systems." The Reg FOSS desk discovered it in his first experiments with Linux 30 years ago, on the Lasermoon Linux/FT distro – the first POSIX.1 certified Linux. Before Linux, it was in SunOS – it's mentioned in the docs for the IRAF tool from 1995. We suspect that, as per this Stack Overflow answer, it predates the X window system and may go back to SunView, released in 1985, which also crops up in the FreeBSD docs. This is ancient Unix technology, inherited...
First seen: 2026-01-07 14:43
Last seen: 2026-01-07 14:43