Suggestion for Xorg / about middle-mouse click pasting

[Robert Heller]

At Thu, 30 Jul 2020 14:39:04 -0400 Elie Goldman Smith <elie.goldman.smith at gmail.com> wrote:

> 
> 
> 
> Countless people on forums say that middle-mouse pasting is an X11 feature.
> 
> This document seems to confirm that it's an X11 feature:
> https://www.jwz.org/doc/x-cut-and-paste.html
> 
> 
> Please correct me if I'm wrong.

The original mice on Sun, DEC, and SGI workstations of the late 1970s through
the mid/late 1980s all had 3 buttons. A common *usage* by *UNIX* users was to
use the middle button for pasting (text). This was (and still is) a standard
binding for xterms (the original XAW flavored xterm). In those days, most
applications did not bother with a "right button" context menu (that would
feature "Cut, Copy, Paste" items on it and many applications might not have a
menu bar (xterms don't and also don't have a "right button" context menu
wither). The text editor of choice of the *UNIX* users of that time was either
vi or Emacs, neither of which had a GUI (aka point-and-click) version (at the
time). Word processing barely existed at all and not at all on *UNIX*
workstations.

So, copy and paste was pretty much only a matter of highlighting with the left
button and pasting with the middle button. X11 itself did not (and xorg still
does not) define this behaviour. (And yes, *I* still use old school xterms --
I find all of the "modern" <mumble>-term programs obnoxious.) All X11/xorg
does is pass pointer events with possible button state modifiers. The
*applications* implement what happens (or does not happen) with those events.
It became a convention to implement the middle button as the paste button.
Many "modern" applications implement context menus and/or have menu bars with
Edit menus, either/both include cut, copy, and paste menu items. Old school
xterms *still* don't implement either a context menu (right button) or have a
menu bar (and thus don't have an edit menu). People who learned computers
under MacOS or MS-Windows never learned this usage, since neither Macs or
"PCs" (MS-Windows) ever had plain middle buttons, unless some *UNIX* (Linux)
hacker connected one. Native MacOS (Classic or X) and MS-Windows applications
never defined any sort of behaviour for middle buttons, since those machines
never had middle buttons and thus people starting to use Linux are "suddenly"
seeing this behaviour which appears novel to them and don't understand it.
This is *especially* true when they mostly use "modern" applications that
mimic MacOS or MS-Windows usage (and thus have context menus and/or edit
menus), and *sometimes* also implement middle button paste, which in that
context appears redundant and/or extrainious. The thing is the context menus
and/or edit menus are the (so-called) "user friendly" add-ons. Get over it. If
it *really* bothers you, go back to your toy machines running their toy
operating systems.  And leave us UNIX/Linux users' middle buttons alone.


> 
> 
> On Friday, July 24, 2020, Alan Coopersmith <alan.coopersmith at oracle.com>
> wrote:
> 
> > On 7/23/20 1:19 AM, Elie Goldman Smith wrote:
> >
> >> 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.
> >>
> >
> > It would not be, because it is not a X server behavior.  It is simply
> > a convention implemented in dozens of toolkits and thousands of
> > applications, with no centralized control.
> >
> > All the X server does is tell the client that button 2 was pressed, and
> > everything after that happens client side.
> >
> > --
> >         -Alan Coopersmith-               alan.coopersmith at oracle.com
> >          Oracle Solaris Engineering - https://blogs.oracle.com/alanc
> >
> 
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