XMousePasteBlock

Listens for middle mouse click events and clears the primary X selection (and cut buffers) on detection to avoid accidentially pasting stuff all over the place.

About

No need to disable your precious middle mouse button bindings, no clearing of visual selections nor performance losses because of emptying the primary X clipboard periodically. With the utilization of XInput and Xlibs this has no measurable impact on performance whatsoever. No elevated privileges required. Just run within your regular users' X session.

Installation

On Arch Linux you may simply use the AUR package.

For all other distros, please follow the instructions below.

Dependencies

You might need to install the libev, Xlib and X11 Input extension headers.

Debian and derivatives (e.g. Ubuntu):

sudo apt-get install libev-dev libx11-dev libxi-dev

Fedora:

sudo dnf install libev-devel libX11-devel libXi-devel

Building

Compile and install:

make
sudo make install

Note for OpenBSD users (click to expand)

Before running make, please uncomment the respective comments inside the Makefile

Running

Just add xmousepasteblock to your startup script/config.

Note: If you're using any kind of clipboard manager, make sure your it does not prevent clearing the PRIMARY selection. E.g. "Klipper" does that by default with the option "Prevent empty clipboard".

Known issues

Does not support remapped mouse buttons, e.g. via xinput set-button-map