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> Haven't used Linux in forever, but middle-click to paste was like the one thing that consistently worked everywhere.

That's because it was an X11 thing, and everyone used X11.

X11 doesnt really define those things. Policy, not mechanism.

X heavily relied on the primary and secondary selections for performing operations in lieu of an explicit clipboard. It is built into the protocol. The only policy is where that paste binding defaulted to.

X doesn't even enforce primary or secondary selections, they have no special meaning to the protocol. What is built on the protocol is this mechanism to do clipboard-like things. Even how many actual clipboard thingies you have is policy and not builtin into the protocol.

While X11 didn't define it, the defaults were such that it would be harder to write a program that didn't do that then one that did in many cases.

Not at all. Unless you specifically coded this handler for the middle button and wrote code for fetching selections and all, you would not get this behavior. It would be easier for the middle button to do nothing.

You may be thinking of toolkits like Gtk+ or Qt which implement this behavior, but it is really just a convention shared by many desktop toolkits rather than anything defined by X11.

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