Why I like middle mouse button paste in xterm so much

February 17, 2019

In my entry about how touchpads are not mice, I mused that one of the things I should do on my laptop was insure that I had a keyboard binding for paste, since middle mouse button is one of the harder multi-finger gestures to land on a touchpad. Kurt Mosiejczuk recently left a comment there where they said:

Shift-Insert is a keyboard equivalent for paste that is in default xterm (at least OpenBSD xterm, and putty on Windows too). I use that most of the time now as it seems less... trigger-happy than right click paste.

This sparked some thoughts, because I can't imagine giving up middle mouse paste if I have a real choice. I had earlier seen shift-insert mentioned in other commentary on my entry and so have tried a bit to use it on my laptop, and it hasn't really felt great even there; on my desktops, it's even less appealing (I tried shift-insert out there to confirm that it did work in my set of wacky X resources).

In thinking about why this is, I came to the obvious realization about why all of this is so. I like middle mouse button paste in normal usage because it's so convenient, because almost all of the time my hand is already on the mouse. And the reason my hand is already on the mouse is because I've just used the mouse to shift focus to the window I want to paste into. Even on my laptop, my right hand is usually away from the keyboard as I move the mouse pointer on the touchpad, making shift-Insert at least somewhat awkward.

(The exception that proves the rule for me is dmenu. Dmenu is completely keyboard driven and when I bring it up, Ctrl-Y to paste the current X selection is completely natural.)

I expect that people who use the keyboard to change window focus have a pretty different experience here, whether they're using a fully keyboard driven window manager or simply one where they use Alt-Tab (or the equivalent) to select through windows. My laptop's Cinnamon setup has support for Alt-Tab window switching, so perhaps I should try to use it more. On the other hand, making the text selection I'm copying is generally going to involve the mouse or touchpad, even on my laptop.

(I don't think I want to try keyboard window switching in my desktop fvwm setup for various reasons, including that I think you want to be using some version of 'click to focus' instead of mouse pointer based focus for this to really work out. Having the mouse pointer in the 'wrong' window for your focus policy seems like a recipe for future problems and unpleasant surprises. On top of that, X's handling of scroll wheels means that I often want the mouse pointer to be in the active window just so I can use my mouse's scroll wheel.)

PS: Even if it's possible to use keyboard commands to try to select things in xterm or other terminal emulators, I suspect that I don't want to bother trying it. I rather expect it would feel a lot like moving around and marking things in vi(m), with the added bonus of having to remember an entire different set of keystrokes that wouldn't work in Firefox and other non-terminal contexts.


Comments on this page:

By lilydjwg at 2019-02-19 04:24:49:

I expect that people who use the keyboard to change window focus have a pretty different experience here.

Yes, I use the Awesome WM and I use keyboard to paste the X selection a lot when my hands are already on keyboard. My input method (fcitx) has a plugin to manage and paste text. I also use mouse and middle-click pastes when I feel it's easier.

I do not select text with keyboard except in Vim or selecting all. It is much more convenient to use mouse in certain cases. Touchpads are good for scrolling in all directions (two-finger scrolling), or scrolling a long document (circular scrolling). Except that, I prefer a mouse. BTW I do have a middle button above my touchpad. It's one of the reasons I choose ThinkPad.

Written on 17 February 2019.
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Last modified: Sun Feb 17 22:46:50 2019
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