Disable xorg's "highlight to copy, middle click to paste" clipboard
 

Is there any way I can disable the highlight to copy, middle click to paste "feature"? I have a laptop with middle click emulation turned on (I am NOT willing to turn this off!), so I accidentally paste random things into random documents all the time. I have scoured the web for info, and found very little. Isn't there some xorg.conf option to disable this?

Thank you!

I'm sure there are other ways of achieving it, but here's one you can try. This is more or less off the top of my head; I read this from somewhere a long ago (while wondering why my mouse wheel didn't scroll in Slackware), but you can safely try it -- change your configuration back to normal if it's not what you like :) The original thing was with a wheel mouse, but try (and play around if needed) and see if it works with your emulated mouse as well. I don't see why it wouldn't.

The "trick" would be to remap the middle button (usually wheel click in a wheelmouse, or just middle button) that is used to paste to something else than the real middle button; this way the pasting shouldn't happen, because the mouse acts like you pressed something else than middle-button -- for example left button. The mouse buttons are numbered so that (at least in an ordinary right-handed mouse) left button is number one, middle button number two, right button number three and so on (wheel is usually numbers 4 and 5). So in that case button number 2 (middle button) should be mapped to something else, say left button (1).

To try it, modify your xorg.conf file and try adding a line like this to the mouse section:

That's a line for a wheel mouse (left- and right buttons, wheel click, wheel scroll = 5 "buttons"), modify it for your needs. Note the beginning: in a normal case the numbers would be "1 2 3" and so on (left/middle/right etc.), but here the middle button (2) is mapped to left button (1).

Hope it helps. If you find a more clever way of doing it, or just some other way, post it here for other readers.