Hold on, is it true that when you select something in windows (not sure about macos), go to any other program (and to an input box thingy) and press the middle mouse button, the selected text doesn't get placed there?!

Is that just a Linux (and possibly macos?) feature?!

I couldn't go without it 😍

I do believe that's Linux only. Mac and Windows don't have the concept of a selection clipboard thing like Linux.

@tbodt Damn, Mac and windows users are missing out then!

@MrJimmy I'm not exactly talking about copy paste, I'm talking about the middle mouse button and selecting text :)

Apart from that I never had what you described so idk

@MrJimmy that doesn't happen to me. I use KDE Plasma, and it has the neatest clipboard I have ever used.

@MrJimmy
Depending on what you copy, you will have the same effect in windows. Basically, at the time you press copy, the program dumps a lot of different representations of the selected object into the clipboard. For example, if you copy a PowerPoint slide, you have a text representation, an image, and a pointer to the source slide.
The receiving program asks for a specific representation (and failing that, another, etc.)
In the PowerPoint example, you can close the source PowerPoint and paste your clipboard as text or image - but you cannot paste it as a slide, because for that, the source PowerPoint would be needed.

@linuxxx what drove me insane is that when you middle-click the window bar, the app goes background

It's been a while, but when I did dev on a windows machine, putty had that functionality, well almost. When you selected anything in a putty terminal (ssh for windows), it automatically copied that to the clipboard.

@SnuKies That's window manager specific (you could use a different one) and can probably be changed.

And middle clicking a link doesn't open in new tab on windows, middle clicking a tab doesn't close it, ...

The number of times I expected a middle click to do something on windows but failed is too damn high

@epse you probably installed a mouse driver that repurposes the middle mouse click. Because what you describe works like that on windows, I use it all the time.

I don’t have a middle mouse button... not even a mouse.
Though I like the copy log in Alfred app, it keeps a log of everything I copy, so I can access it later, after reboot too. That’s how I discovered that cells in Excel is often copied as an image, and not text

GNU/Linux users seem to use the MMB 100-times more than Windows users, for example sometimes I forget that MMB even exists and I never use it

@MrJimmy that problem is solved by a program that runs in the background called a clipboard server that watches the clipboard and saves everything on it so if the original program closes the server can still provide the data

@MrJimmy as a matter of fact this is the default behavior and it is by design as described here https://standards.freedesktop.org/c... (last paragraph). Each DE has its own clipboard manager (daemon) to have persistent clipboard. Maybe you are missing a clipboard manager (at least this was the issue in my case when using gnome on Fedora)

My mmb doesn't even work :|
It works on another mouse but that mouse left click sucks.

@irene @christiaan what. It registers as middle click as far as I can see but just does a normal click and opens in the current tab... (I'm talking about the thinkpad trackpad middle click button configured as middle click)