Disabling the "Paste the current selection when middle-click is pressed" does nothing

[daenvil]

Distribution

Mint 22.3

Package version

6.6.6

Graphics hardware in use

No response

Frequency

Always

Bug description

I disabled this option in the mouse settings, yet middle-click keeps pasting text anywhere.

Steps to reproduce

• Go to mouse settings
• Disable "Paste the current selection when middle-click is pressed"
• Try selecting text and middle-clicking somewhere where text can be written
• Text is pasted

Expected behavior

Nothing should be pasted on middle-click when this option is disabled

Additional information

No response

[dev-AbhinavNair]

I did some testing and wanted to share the findings in case they help.

The setting
org.cinnamon.desktop.interface gtk-enable-primary-paste
does toggle correctly via the GUI. However, even when it is set to false, X11 still delivers raw middle-click (Button2) events to applications (xev shows ButtonPress/ButtonRelease for button 2), so Cinnamon itself is not intercepting anything at that level.

More interestingly, I tested with GNOME Text Editor (the system GTK package, not the Flatpak), and it behaves correctly when gtk-enable-primary-paste is set to false:

• Middle-click paste does not work inside the app.
• Selecting text inside GNOME Text Editor does not populate PRIMARY.
• Selecting text inside the app appears to clear PRIMARY, because after doing so, middle-click paste no longer works anywhere until text is selected outside the app again.

Outside of GNOME Text Editor (other apps / general desktop):

• Simply highlighting text still populates PRIMARY.
• Middle-click paste continues to work as usual.

This suggests that GTK already supports the intended behavior for this setting, and that at least some GTK apps (GNOME Text Editor) fully respect it by not claiming PRIMARY and by clearing it when selection changes. The inconsistent behavior seems to come from the setting not being applied consistently across the session, rather than from middle-click paste itself.

In other words, the issue doesn’t appear to be the paste action or Button2 handling, but that PRIMARY selection is still being populated in many contexts even when gtk-enable-primary-paste is disabled.

Hopefully these observations help narrow down where the mismatch is happening.