Pretty sure most of you already know this but for those who don’t: you have two clipboards in Linux. One is the traditional clipboard where you copy with control c and paste with control v. The other one is when you highlight text and use the mouse middle click to paste text.
More details here.
Not going to lie, I hate the middle click clipboard and disable it ASAP. I really dislike the idea that it copies things without my explicit permission.
I don’t believe anything is actually copied until you request it to be pasted. The clipboards in Linux mark where the data is, and don’t actually initiate a copy until there’s a destination.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/clipboard
Yes. You can test this by selecting something, closing that window and attempting to paste. It won’t work. Closing the window removes the information about what was highlighted, so there is nothing to paste. If it were to copy upon selection you’d still be able to paste.
Lol I have gotten so used to it that I can barely use web terminals that don’t support it
I actually like the feature but could you explain how you disabled it? I’ve tried to merge all three clipboards into one a few years ago and couldn’t make it work
KDE has the option to disable middle click paste, so I do that. Out of sight, out of mind
Whenever I use a touchpad without physical buttons, I usually disable the middle button entirely. It’s more of a hammer-to-mosquito solution than what you were asking, but it’s as easy as adding this command to the autostart file (on Xorg):
xinput set-button-map "Name-of-your-Touchpad-goes-here" 1 0 3 4 5 6 7, where “Name-of-your-Touchpad-goes-here” can be found withxinput list --name-only.