Suggestion for Xorg / about middle-mouse click pasting

[Sam Varshavchik]

On Thu, Jul 30, 2020 at 3:06 PM Elie Goldman Smith
<elie.goldman.smith at gmail.com> wrote:

> Countless people on forums say that middle-mouse pasting is an X11 feature.

"X11" is not the same thing as an "X server".

> This document seems to confirm that it's an X11 feature:
> https://www.jwz.org/doc/x-cut-and-paste.html

Yes, it does. This document confirms that middle mouse button click
events are X11 features.

Pay attention to this part:

# So how do I implement this?
#
# middle button paste, if implemented  | Retrieve and insert PRIMARY selection.

Pay attention to the "if implemented" part. If not implemented, this
does nothing.

An X client chooses to implement whatever events it wants. If it
chooses to implement the middle button as a paste button, it then
proceeds to retrieve and insert the PRIMARY selection from the server.
If it chooses not to do so, nothing happens. The X server has
absolutely nothing to do, whatsoever. The X server's only
responsibility is to forward mouse button events to the client, to do
whatever it wants with it. If the client chooses to implement the
middle button as a paste operation,  that's the client's choice. Not
the server's.

Feel free to read

https://www.x.org/releases/X11R7.7/doc/xproto/x11protocol.html

at your leisure, for all the details.


>
>
> Please correct me if I'm wrong.
>
>
> 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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