Suggestion for Xorg / about middle-mouse click pasting

[Carsten Haitzler (The Rasterman)]

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

> 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.

It's an ecosystem convention. It's not a feature of xorg or the xorg core
libraries (xlib) specifically (though xt/xaw does implement it but almost no one
uses that anymore so it's moot). These tools are used to implement
middle-mouse past by toolkits. They all then repeat the pattern making it an
ecosystem-wide convention. Not just toolkits but entire apps that don't use
toolkits at all implement it too.

I'd advise that just because a lot of people say something, does not make it
true. When you talk to developers here who know and write the actual code that
is involved in this and they tell you otherwise, you'd be wise to take that as
actual fact. You are welcome to dig into all of the code yourself and prove
them wrong... I'm sure they are all cracking open a beer and waiting with baited
breath to see the results. :)

> 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
> >


-- 
------------- Codito, ergo sum - "I code, therefore I am" --------------
Carsten Haitzler - raster at rasterman.com