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.
It’s one of the things that I hated at first when moving from Windows, but then I got so used to it I just can’t live without it. Whenever I use Windows, I would try to quickly copypaste text using selection, doing so for 5-10 seconds, until I realise this is not a thing on this OS.
Ditto. And sometimes I use both the Ctrl+C and middle-click clipboards at the same time, when I want to copy two chunks of text. Like this:
- Select chunk A, press Ctrl+C
- Select chunk B
- Shift window
- Paste chunk B through middle-click
- Paste chunk A through Ctrl+V
Windows and KDE Plasma both have CMD + V to show a list of all things that have been copied. So I always just do Ctrl + C, Ctrl + C, Ctrl + V, CMD + V -> down arrow -> enter. Though on KDE Plasma you will need another Ctrl + V to actually do the pasting after you have selected the value to paste, whereas on Windows selecting the value also pastes it. But the workflows are very similar.
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.
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
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 with xinput list --name-only.
