How to restore ability to use middle mouse button (on X11) to paste selected text?

[Andrew15-5]

If I just open my terminal with my shell, then I can paste selected text from a browser. If I instead open the same terminal, but with zellij and inside of it my shell, then the MMB paste action become unavailable for some reason.

When I check the dumped default config, I have found something similar:

// Toggle enabling the mouse mode.
// On certain configurations, or terminals this could
// potentially interfere with copying text.
// Options:
//   - true (default)
//   - false
//
// mouse_mode false

But since it's already enabled by default, it means that this doesn't control what I want to do.

[Lockszmith-GH]

Have you tried Ctrl+G and then pasting?

[Andrew15-5]

Yes. I found out that Ctrl + / also doesn't work. If this program is intended for daily local host use, then this is very limiting, in a way. I hope there is a way to make it work, or a new feature request can be created.

[Lockszmith-GH]

I personally use the keyboard more than the mouse

Ctrl+Shift+V is usually what I use to paste.

The reason you are experiencing this change in behavior is because zellij takes over mouse control.

This allows selecting text within a pane, instead of lines being absolute to the try connection.

I think you can disable mouse control in the config.

[Andrew15-5]

The reason you are experiencing this change in behavior is because zellij takes over mouse control.

I also wanted to add that with default Neovim I can use MMB to paste. So how come Neovim inside zellij can take over mouse control from zellij?

Uncommenting mouse_mode false does solve the problem, and I don't really plan on using cursor to interact with zellij, so this is good enough for me.

I personally use the keyboard more than the mouse

And I use the keyboard so much that I hate grabbing the mouse every single time, so I have a touchpad (and mouse is for special cases).

Sometimes it's just easier to select text from GUI with touchpad and then paste it with 3-finger tap to a terminal. I don't want to over-pollute my clipboard manager's history, so I don't want to constantly copy everything to the clipboard (instead selection and MMB use primary selection (default in xclip, i.e., XA_PRIMARY).

[Lockszmith-GH]

nvim has their own mouse capturing. I've noticed this when selecting within nvim doesn't end up in the clipboard (at least not on Windows).

There I use Shift while selecting, this bypasses both zellij's and nvim's mouse capturing. But that might be a feature of the terminal I'm using - it works the same for me in Tabby and Windows Terminal.

I'm glad that mouse_mode false solved the current problem for you.

[xbello]

I also couldn't do proper MMB paste, specially when selecting multiline, that with mouse_mode false spans the selection to the adjacent panels, but with mouse_mode true doesn`t paste on MMB. My workaround:

1. Install both xbindkeys and xte.

2. Create a $HOME/xbindkeysrc with xbindkeys --defaults > $HOME/.xbindkeyrc.

3. Link the MMB click to "Ctrl + Shift + V" adding the following two lines to .xbindkeyrc, including quotes:

   "xte 'keydown Control_L' 'keydown Shift_L' 'key V' 'keyup Shift_L' 'keyup Control_L'"
   b:2
   

It seems that Zellij copies-on-select, but not to the buffer that MMB uses, but to the buffer that is retrieved with Ctl+Shf+V

[Andrew15-5]

MMB paste works if you hold shift key. I discovered this by accident. Either just by myself, or by reading the docs in the default config file, or by reading docs on the website.

So now I can have this feature on and be able to paste text. The downside is that you can't really do this with one hand.

[morgoth]

@Andrew15-5 Thanks for the tip.
@imsnif Is it possible to do a custom keybinding for middle mouse to this paste action? Since it's working with "Shift + MMB", I guess it should be possible to bind MMB itself, but I cannot find such action and MMB in the https://github.com/zellij-org/zellij/blob/main/zellij-utils/assets/config/default.kdl nor https://zellij.dev/documentation/keybindings-possible-actions