Can I copy by highlighting and paste by middle click on Mac OS X?

I was using Linux for the last couple of years and I find it extremely useful to copy text by highlighting it as well as to paste by clicking a middle mouse button.

I'm using a Mac now and I wonder if I can achieve such behaviour on Mac OS X.

I wrote a free little C program that does something similar to Gilligan's answer. Whenever you drag-highlight or double-click text, it copies to the clipboard buffer. Then you can middle-mouse-click in any window to paste it. It is called "macpaste" and on Github (https://github.com/lodestone/macpaste). It works globally for every program I use that has textual data.

In iTerm2, disable their middle-click in Preferences, otherwise you'll get double pastes.

You can try BetterTouchTool. You can assign custom trackpad, mouse, and keyboard events to trigger specific actions on a global or application-specific basis.

Here's my configuration to bind a three-finger tap to ⌘V (as this is the global paste shortcut. Alternatively you can select from dozens of other trackpad and mouse gestures to emulate the paste command.

The macOS terminal can do copy/paste with two separate buffers:

1. The copy/paste buffer which is shared with all other applications. It can be accessed by CommandC/CommandV.
2. A separate copy/past buffer which is shared only between (macOS) terminals. It can be filled (copy) by dragging over the text by mouse, double clicking, or ShiftCommand double-clicking for file names (no CommandV). The content of this buffer is pasted by the middle mouse button, by ShiftCommandV, or by Command + two-finger-click.