I’m unable to actually disable middle click paste on my plasma install. The “Middle-click: Pastes selected text” option under general behavior is already disabled. “Keep the selection and clipboard the same” is also disabled under the clipboard settings. The pasting still occurs under firefox, electron apps (logseq, element, etc), but not in all of them, like most of the kde apps (settings, dolphin, etc)
Is there something I’m missing, or something that may be conflicting with these settings?
Middle mouse paste is an old common Unix idiom. KDE allows you to turn if off, but this “off feature” is not a standard and KDE can’t prevent non-KDE apps from continuing to interpret middle click as “paste from selection”.
The only thing to do, maybe, is to have some sort of process that tries to destroy other applications support for the “selection clipboard” by monitoring it and as soon as it sees something in the selection clipboard - it takes it over and clears it. I’m not familiar with something that does this, but I can think of a few ways to create such a thing.
The ability to highlight text and middle click to duplicate it elsewhere has long been regarded one of the strongest features of using a Linux environment…
Firefox, electron apps etc do not conform to the Plasma desktop, so different behaviours are expected (throw in F10 for the menu for good measure).
I see. Atleast for firefox, I was able to find a way to disable it (about:config → middlemouse.paste = false). I use middle mouse to auto scroll or pretty much anything other than pasting, so its quite frustrating to have a giant piece of text get thrown up in a random text box.
What about Konsole middle-click paste? is it disableable? I can see only in edit current profile → Mouse → either paste from clipboard or paste from selection … but I don’t want to paste at all!
Autoscroll is a very useful feature.. have missed it a lot since moving from Windows. Speeds up UI navigation a lot in almost every app I use, compared to the middle mouse button being a secondary clipboard which is practically useless from my standpoint.
I have Autoscroll enabled in Firefox - I’m not sure where else I would actually use it… but generally it’s something useful in very limited instances (like browsers) and is generally defined by software, not operating system.
For example, with a PDF in Okular, middle click is defaulted to zoom (easy to navigate by dragging down to zoom out, then zoom in where you want to go - better than ‘autoscroll’).
I can’t really think of any time I wanted autoscroll where I couldn’t use it though TBH - this is a very general thread with little real-world use (mostly just 'Windows does this, so I want that - whether it’s really good or not - just because I remember using it).
There is a reason, why paste is TWO key combination. On top of that, mouse wheel has another totally different function attached to it, making you fiddle it all the time.
I didn’t understand your point, sorry… but for sure, I do ‘fiddle’ with my mouse quite a lot and also with my keyboard.
If my hand’s on the mouse, I don’t want to have to move it to the keyboard and vice versa… so I do have some actions which work with both - one thing I enjoyed about using mouse-gestures on X11 was that I could do everything more easily with the mouse.
The mousewheel generally gets used for Vertical Scrolling (mousewheel up/down) for navigation.
Include horizontal scrolling with Shift and mousewheel up/down.
The next action I’d suggest is the middle-click which has many functions:
Opening things in new tabs
Closing tabs
Pasting
Activating auto-scroll
There are other modifiers - Ctrl often makes mousewheel up/down do zooming which is good for browsers/image/document softwares.
Then there are probably a myriad of other application-specific actions…
Generally speaking, if you don’t like what the standard mouse buttons do, I suggest getting a mouse with some programmable buttons.
(I use a Logitech G300s with a project called ratslap. I map right-click, button 3, to middle-click, button 2, because I paste much more often than I use right click, and use one of the extra buttons to get a right-click.)