Suggestion for Xorg / about middle-mouse click pasting

[Adam Nielsen]

> I'm writing to suggest that Xorg's middle-mouse pasting should be an
> optional feature, not an unchangeable behavior.

Where are you seeing this Xorg behaviour?  If I run "xev" and click the
middle mouse button, I only see a "button 2 pressed" event, I don't see
any events relating to the clipboard.

I don't think Xorg sends any clipboard events by default?  Please
correct me if I'm wrong but it looks like Xorg isn't the source of this
issue.

> 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.

For what it's worth, I have been scrolling through documents for decades
and never once pasted anything by accident with the middle click.  It
sounds like your mouse is faulty as every mouse I have ever used has
required considerable effort to actuate the middle mouse button, to the
point that I have once disassembled my mouse and replaced the
microswitch in it for the mouse wheel to make it easier to press.

> This isn't simply a matter of mouse scroll wheels that click too
> easily. Laptop touchpads are known to paste accidentally too.

I've also used a touchpad for a long time and never managed to get it
to paste anything.  I didn't even know I could get it to emit a
middle-click!

I'm not saying this is a non-issue, just that I think you are
overestimating the number of people affected by it.

> Solution:
> Middle-mouse pasting would be great as a setting that can be
> enabled/disabled by 'xset' on the command line.

As far as I know, Xorg doesn't ascribe any special behaviour to the
middle mouse button, and leaves it up to applications themselves.
Middle-click pasting has become a defacto standard, with every
application implementing this independently.

This means that I don't think there is a way you can completely disable
middle-click pasting, other than configuring every program that uses it
to stop doing it, using whatever way they decided to do it when they
implemented their custom middle-button event handler.  For toolkits like
GTK you can probably toggle it in one place and affect a whole bunch of
programs, but it looks like it will always require individual programs
to be configured manually.

> I would bet that desktop linux distros would disable middle-mouse
> pasting by default, if they could.

They already can for many applications but they don't because so many
people like this feature.  Firefox disabled opening URLs on a
middle-click by default for example, but it's one of the first options
I go in and turn back on when using a fresh install because it's so
convenient.

> 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'.

They will soon learn to stop this behaviour :)  Linux is and always has
been aimed at very technical people, so if you start dumbing it down for
the masses you will get a lot of criticism.  People switch to Linux
precisely because it doesn't treat you like a simpleton, and sure most
people will tell you the transition was hard and there was a huge
amount to learn, but now they've gotten used to it they appreciate why
things are the way they are.

It might be tough to kick your idle middle-clicking habit, but if you
can do it, you'll eventually wonder how you ever managed without
middle-click pasting!

Cheers,
Adam.