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 from systems released when this vulture was still in school. We like it a great deal, and badly miss it on macOS, as well as on Windows, where as we noted in 2022 even the excellent Taekwindow can't help. Taekwindow does bring another handy Linux use of the middle button to Windows: middle-click the title bar of any window to put it behind all the other windows, and other window-management improvements – but sadly, that's all. GNOME's growing use of "client side decorations" instead of proper title bars already broke the handy send-to-back feature years ago.

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Call us paranoid, but we feel attacked. Once again, it feels to us very much like the GNOME developers – quite a few of whom are relative youngsters – simply don't know how to make the best use of what are apparently old-fashioned input devices like multi-button mice. As a result, they see useful facilities as unnecessary, and want to take them away from those of us who value them.

We implore the GNOME team: please, spend a weekend on a Windows desktop PC with no pointing device and learn to drive it with the keyboard alone. Start with a blank installation of Win 10 LTSC, use Ninite to install a bunch of FOSS apps. Configure Firefox and Thunderbird for keyboard use. It's like Vim but for the entire OS. It is so fast and efficient and capable, you will feel as if you are a god-like superhero of computing. You'll be amazed. You'll pick up skills you'll be able to use every day for the rest of your life, and it's fun. Please. Just try it. And then maybe you will see why we object to you removing these facilities.

Bootnote

We suspect that Petridis will have scornful words for this article. In an earlier blog post, Rust in Peace, he mentions:

We suspect, from some comments on Mastodon and other places, that this comment refers personally to this vulture and his accessibility advocacy. For instance, our story on Apple accessibility in 2025 along with previous criticisms of Linux accessibility. ®