How do I disable middle mouse button click paste?

Question

Is there a way to disable the middle mouse button paste behavior that is here by default on gnome?

I have a sensitive mouse wheel and whenever I scroll texts, sometimes it pastes stuff randomly into the text. I lose quite a lot of credibility when I send a file to someone else that has random text snippets pasted all over it.

I have seen a solution that goes by mapping the mouse's middle button to a non-existant mouse button, but that implies getting rid of the middle mouse button altogether (i.e. no tab-closing, opening links into a new tab automatically, etc.). I'd like to keep my middle mouse button active, just disable the pasting behavior.

This also happens when I scroll text with my touchpad (accidentally hit two-fingers without moving, bam.) so the problem will not be fixed just by changing for a new mouse (in fact I believe it happens more often with my touchpad than with my mouse).

Thanks.

Answer 1

For a solution to the problem, please view this guide I wrote: http://www.assembla.com/spaces/slipstream/wiki/Disabling_GTK's_middle_mouse_button_functionality

Or, more directly, here's the patch to disable the 'middle mouse button paste' functionality in GTK: http://subversion.assembla.com/svn/slipstream/patches/gtk_disable_middle_mouse_button_paste.patch

Answer 2

This currently isn't possible - though, as you have mentioned, there are ways to disable the MOUSE 3 button - or remap it- none of those get at the source of the issue. The X11 Primary Selection.

While this isn't a solution, hopefully this explanation will make it clear WHY. In Ubuntu there are two clipboards at work. One, which everyone is familiar with, the freedesktop.org clipboard (captures Ctrl+C command) The second is a clipboard manager that has been at play since before Ubuntu even existed - X11. The X Server (X11) manages three other clipboards: Primary Selection, Secondary Selection, and Clipboard. When you select text with your pointer it gets copied to a buffer in the XServer, the Primary Selection, and awaits pasting by means of the Mouse 3 button. The other two were designed to be used by other applications in a means to share a common clipboard between applications. In this case the freedesktop.org clipboard manager in Ubuntu already does this for us.

Through the extent of my research I can not find a way to disable the X11 selection manager. There are no compilation flags, applications, or configuration values that can disable this. There are various ways around this on a per application basis (majority of these applications being command line ones) - but nothing on a global scale.

I realize this isn't an ideal solution - but seems to be the truth to the issue. The only relevant solution I could muster is actually a hack, create a script that executes an infinite while loop that just replaces the Primary Selection with a null value.

First install xsel (Tool for manipulation of the X selection) sudo apt-get install xsel

The code is as follows:

while(true)
do
    echo -n | xsel -n -i
    sleep 0.5
done

If you place this in a script and add it to your startup scripts this shouldn't be an issue.

Answer 3

Jared Robinson gave a simple solution that works on my machine:

Run the following command:

xmodmap -e "pointer = 1 25 3 4 5 6 7 8 9"

To persist this behavior, edit ~/.Xmodmap and add

pointer = 1 25 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

Answer 4

I realise that this is not exactly the answer you want, but you can turn this off in Firefox (e.g. if you don't mind the feature elsewhere, but still want middle click in Firefox to open links in new tabs)

In about:config, set

middlemouse.contentLoadURL false
middlemouse.paste false

Not what you asked, but as this question is linked to from a few places I hope someone finds this answer useful.

Answer 5

This middle mouse button paste behavior is a feature of the X server (and gpm on the text console) and as far as I know at least X.org can't be configured to disable it - all you can do is to change the mapping of the physical mouse buttons as others already suggested.

Chances are good that you can configure your touchpad to avoid unwanted middle clicks, see gpointing-device-settings (not installed by default) or the synaptics manpage if you prefer to use your editor for configuration.

Answer 6

I had the same problem a few months ago and I solved it by changing the mouse! But, as you, I was frustrated that simple button mapping problem can't be solved elegantly by a software fix. Fortunately, I had the problem on my job computer, and my employer owns a variety of spare mouse controllers. It was a no cost fix!

I think a proper mouse hardware implementation should not send random middle clicks while scrolling. Recently I found this behaviour to get annoying even while using Windows!

Now that I've fixed the hardware bug with the proper hardware solution (change the mouse) I even started an addiction to "paste on middle-click" behaviour!!

Happy linuxing!

Sincerly,

Answer 7

The best way I've found so far is to use EasyStroke, which can globally intercept middle-button click and allow to behave as middle button only in certain apps.

You can add a "group" in EasyStroke to apply this interception in multiple applications at once. I've set to disable middle click in some of my text editors, IDE and MATLAB only and works as intended.

Reference: http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=11811126&postcount=25

Complete EasyStroke How-To: http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/easystroke/wiki/Documentation

Answer 8

That's a good question, which i don't have an answer for (yet). A quick and dirty workaround is to remap it NOT to 0, but to 1. This way, it turns middle-"click" to left click, and does not affect your scroller... It is so far the best I can think of.

Note:This information came from Ubuntu Forums, not my own noggin! :)

Answer 9

It's more than a gnome feature, i think it works almost everywhere, it works in the console too, and I think it worked even in my "Linux from Scratch".

So it's really a basic feature perhaps even somewhere in the kernel.

BTW: It's really useful, and it's not the regular paste like Ctrl + V, everything that is marked with the cursor goes in a second storage and with middleclick can paste, what you marked last.

Answer 10

If you are using Chrome / Chromium then you can install an extension that will give you scroll in most web pages.

AutoScroll extension link:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/occjjkgifpmdgodlplnacmkejpdionan

Answer 11

did you check out gpm ? More info at http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/lucid/man8/gpm.8.html. Available via sudo aptitude install gpm on lucid. I don't see the disable-paste program in the ubuntu package however, the -A option may be worth giving a try.