FG

Copy-on-select, paste-on-middle-click on Mac OS X?

Fresh3 days ago
Mar 15, 2026104452 views
Confidence Score1%
1%

Problem

Is there a way to give OS X the usual X-windows behavior where selecting text in any application automatically copies it to the clipboard, and the middle mouse button automatically pastes it? +C, +V is a little annoying.

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Fix for: Copy-on-select, paste-on-middle-click on Mac OS X?

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This has already been discussed (and answered) on apple.stackexchange.com. The accepted answer in that discussion was to use Better Touch Tool. However, all those solutions that suggest using some tool to map a mouse click to Cmd-V do not completely mimic the behaviour of X, where you can have different content in the mouse-controlled buffer and the keyboard-controlled buffer (i.e., you can paste two different strings depending on whether you middle-click or press CTRL-V).

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