Disable Shift+Insert from pasting from Primary

Question

In Vim, the canonical methods to interact with X11's Clipboard and Primary is to use + and * registers.

There are at least another two ways to paste from Primary into Vim: Shift-Insert and Mouse Middle-Click, which have nearly the same effect of "*p. Their advantage is that they should work even if Vim has no clipboard support (-clipboard).

However, since those are handled by the terminal emulator rather than Vim, if the selected text happens to be too large or comes from a cranky PDF, the paste can be really slow and there is no clean way to abort it.

Edit: There are also security concerns when pasting malicious but apparently innocuous data directly into the terminal.

Hence comes the question: Can Vim be made to refuse text pasted from Shift-Insert? I would not like to unbind it from my terminal, XTerm, because it is the only way to paste text into XTerm.

I do not care much to disable Mouse Middle-Click because, after all, it's the mouse and I'm not touching it as long as I have the keyboard. But if there is a solution to both, I will much glad to disable both.

Answer 1

I found a solution which relies on Vim's +clientserver capability. It just took a small addition to a script I already used. The final result is this vimserver.sh:

#!/bin/sh
if [ -z "$(vim --serverlist)" ]; then
    xterm -name vimserver -xrm 'vimserver*vt100.Translations:#override\
    Shift <KeyPress> Insert: insert-selection(None,None)' \
    -e vim -p --servername XVIM "$@"
else
    xdotool search --classname vimserver windowactivate
    vim --servername XVIM --remote-tab "$@"
fi

I discussed it in detail in my answer to How to open new files in a same Vim instance from Midnight Commander?. The idea is that, with that script, each file I open for editing in Vim is in a separate tab of a same Vim instance in a dedicated XTerm. So issuing

vimserver.sh file1 &
vimserver.sh file2 &
vimserver.sh file3 &

opens the three files in a same new terminal with Vim, each in its own tab.

Since it uses a single, dedicated terminal, the key was to remove the Shift-Insert binding from that XTerm with the option

-xrm 'vimserver*vt100.Translations:#override\
    Shift <KeyPress> Insert: insert-selection(None,None)'

It is not necessary to remove Mouse Middle-Click, as Vim itself deals with that binding (see :help <MiddleMouse>).