» Disable middle mouse pasting (sort of)

Someone asked on IRC how to disable middle mouse pasting in X. Seems like it's a mystery to almost everyone as it's asked on quite a few forums but always left unanswered. I wouldn't want to miss that feature, personally, but well, here's a trick to disable middle mouse pasting in X:

1. list your current mouse pointer X mappings using xmodmap -pp (look at the 2nd column)
2. swap the button 2 with some unused one, typically the highest number
3. add a line e.g. "pointer = 1 9 3 4 5 6 7 8 2" (if you have 9 buttons, for the sake of an example) to ~/.Xmodmap

Note that it will completely disable the middle key (but you'll still be able to use it to scroll as scrolling up and down is mapped to two other distinct pointers in X (4 and 5, actually)) To automate the process, just copy/paste the following snippet into a shell (and execute it):

xmodmap -pp |perl -ne 'BEGIN{@a=();$h=0} {next unless /^\s*\d+\s+\d+\s*$/; ($v)=/^\s*\d+\s+(\d+)\s*$/; push(@a,$v); if ($v gt $h) {$h=$v}} END{@b=();foreach(@a){ if ($_ eq "2"){push(@b,$h)} elsif($_ eq $h){push(@b,"2")} else{push(@b,$_)} }; print "pointer = ".join(" ",@b)."\n";}' >> ~/.Xmodmap