[phantasmish]

As a compulsive text highlighter, I’ve always found this feature more trouble than it’s worth, by a pretty wide margin. Plus, its inability to replace text means I have to be familiar with the keyboard shortcuts anyway. I find it easier to use just the one set of commands. I’d get tripped up over “wait, did I copy that, or just highlight it?” otherwise. Better for me to have just the one habit.

I understand that some folks really like it but can’t quite grasp why. Though I believe them when they say it’s useful for them.

[manbart]

Convenience. You can copy/paste without touching the keyboard at all

[bilkow]

You don't need primary selection to avoid the keyboard, you can also hold right-click on your selection and release it on "copy" (or right-click on your selection then left-click on copy, more intuitive but slightly more cumbersome)

I agree it's less convenient (there's an extra step: explicitly copying the text), but in my experience it's also more reliable as you don't lose it by just selecting anything.

[jenadine]

I'm both a compulsive text highlighter, and a middle click paster. This is not mutually exclusive. It's not because I highlighted something that I will paste it, I usually know when I'm going to paste something.

What I don't like is website that only have a button to copy something because it ends up in the wrong clipboard and that's confusing.

[ikidd]

It's the thing you do most with selected text and it removes the need to use a keyboard shortcut.

Selecting text with no purpose and being worried that it's a security hole is like saying "I leave my car on the street with the keys in it therefore nobody should have keys".

[bilkow]

I'd argue it's more like "looking at your keys while you're picking them". Selecting text is also known as highlighting and some people highlight text while reading / thinking.

[fn-mote]

I totally disagree.

Or is a huge surprise (to the typical user) that highlighting text BY ITSELF in one window exposes that information for JavaScript running in a different application (like the browser). It’s like knowing that my smart TV is fingerprinting my viewing habits.

Isn’t the biggest security risk from copy and pasting passwords from a “secure” location to another one?

It looks like with modern browsers, reading the clipboard is gated behind some restrictions. Whew.

[jenadine]

Javascript doesn't have access to the clipboard without explicit user actions. And the clipboard might still contain sensitive info regardless of it was something recently highlighted, or something recently explicitly copied.

[oldandboring]

> I’d get tripped up over “wait, did I copy that, or just highlight it?”

I think I'm in this boat too. I use this feature, I'm accustomed to it, but throughout my day I am constantly forgetting whether something is in my selection buffer or my clipboard. Windows and Mac users just don't have this problem.

[thrance]

I'm also a compulsive text highlighter, and I find middle click pasting annoying too. There are dozens of us, dozens!