How to disable middle-click paste in KDE Plasma (Wayland)

how-to-disable-middle-click-paste.md

Environment

• Arch Linux
• KDE Plasma 6.1.5 (Wayland)

Solution

For native Wayland applications

1. open the KDE system settings
2. select "Workspace" -> "General Behavior"
3. uncheck "Middle Click: Paste selected text"
4. Restart the system

For Xwayland applications

(e.g. Discord, etc.)

1. Install XMousePasteBlock

$ yay -S XMousePasteBlock

Perhaps you should choose xmousepasteblock-git. (I failed to build with the xmousepasteblock one)

2. Registering a service in systemd

Create mousepasteblock.service in /etc/systemd/system.

[Unit]
Description=Userspace tool to disable middle mouse button paste in Xorg.

[Service]
ExecStart=/usr/bin/xmousepasteblock

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

3. Reboot the system

For Firefox

Set middlemouse.paste to false in about:config.

Extra

How to enable middle-click scrolling.

For Firefox

Open Firefox Settings and search for "Scroll", Enable "Use autoscrolling".

For Electron software

Add --enable-blink-features=MiddleClickAutoscroll to the startup argument.

Some sentences may be incorrect because they were translated from Japanese using deepl translation.

For anyone else having the weird issue where the first scroll on Discord would still paste something, but consecutive ones don't, just restart your system and it should be solved

To have middle click work as free-form (multiline?) select in vscode like on windows you also need to disable editor.selectionClipboard

there's a systemctl user script automatically installed to /usr/lib/systemd/user/xmousepasteblock.service (at least there was on cachyos).

You can just run systemctl --user enable --now xmousepasteblock to enable it: no need to create anything. Plus, it'll be updated automatically if the package changes.

Content at time of writing:

[Unit]
Description=XmousePasteBlock - Userspace tool to disable middle mouse button paste in Xorg
After=graphical-session.target

[Service]
Type=simple
ExecStart=/usr/bin/xmousepasteblock
Restart=on-failure
RestartSec=5s

[Install]
WantedBy=graphical-session.target