Select and paste with middle click does not work
I am a translator!
Normally, I can select text from any app and middle click will paste the text in a terminal, or I use middle click inside emacs to paste a selecte from emacs or from somewhere else. However, it does not work anymore now.
Any idea on how to restore this? I did not notice exactly when this stopped working, but now that I want edit things in emacs, this makes it extremely painful.
Is this happening on Ecne?
I would first have a look at:
gsettings get org.gnome.desktop.interface gtk-enable-primary-paste
I am a translator!
Yes, on Ecne.
$ gsettings get org.gnome.desktop.interface gtk-enable-primary-paste true
I am a translator!
It used to work before, no idea what happened. On my boyfriend's computer with Ecne, it works fine.
EDIT: I found the issue: the mouse. I tried with another mouse on the same computer, paste selection on middle mouse button click works. I tried the mouse I was using on the other computer on which the middle mouse button click did paste the selection, it does not paste the selection. I was not expecting this because I have been using that mouse for a while and the middle mouse button click used to work, and everything else still works, including turning the mouse wheel.
Incidentally, I just discovered that there is a similar key for MATE, with a slightly shorter path name:
gsettings get org.mate.interface gtk-enable-primary-paste
This is now veering off-topic here, since the actual issue was hardware failure, but on my Aramo system with the default MATE DE the value of this key does control the middle click pasting behavior.
I am a translator!
When searching, I found a number of things:
- in the MATE control centre, in the mouse settings, there is an option to enable or disable using the mouse wheel to paste. I have not checked which schema and key it is modifying.
- explanations that there are 2 independent copy paste mechanisms: the (primary) selection, and the clipboard.
- in mate-terminal, in profile options, there is an option to automatically copy the selection to the clipboard.
- diodon has options to use either the primary selection, or the clipboard or both, but I haven't understood yet how useful it is.
> in the MATE control centre, in the mouse settings, there is an option to enable or disable using the mouse wheel to paste. I have not checked which schema and key it is modifying.
This is indeed setting the gtk-enable-primary-paste key in the org.mate.interface schema to true/false.
Note that the dconf path for that gsettings schema is org/mate/desktop/interface/.