I’ve been experiencing an issue for a while on Linux Mint Cinnamon where my left control key will deselect text in my URL bar or whenever I try to rename a file in my explorer window. I was even playing some Counter-Strike 2 on Steam on my Linux build and it was messing with my crouching capability, which is the left control key.

Here’s the setting to change in your “Mouse and Touchpad” settings menu

Disable the toggle switch for “Show position of pointer when the Control key is pressed” and your selected text should behave normally after that, and by that I mean it should no longer deselect the text when you press left control key to paste something into the field.

1. Open your start menu.
2. Search for “mouse.”
3. Click on your “mouse and touchpad” settings.
4. Toggle the “show position of pointer when the control key is pressed” switch so it is disabled.

At first, I thought my Razer Ornata Chroma keyboard was malfunctioning (I love this keyboard, but the wrist pad deteriorates quickly if you’re a power user), but the left control key works fine when I boot my dual boot system into Windows. I finally came across a thread on the Linux forums that mentioned a setting to show a position of pointer whenever the control key is pressed.

This feature is pretty cool to have enabled, in my opinion, and I think I enabled it a long time ago in Linux and forgot about it. Maybe an update in between was causing an issue, but the feature doesn’t work quite the same on Linux Mint and it lacks the circular animation that Windows has. I really like that circular blip on Windows whenever you press the left control key. Linux just sort of displays a focus outline on whatever element was last focused, so the Linux feature is not quite as neato or as visible as Windows.

Well, I disabled the feature today on Linux to test, and now my URL bar text doesn’t get deselected when I press the left control key. My text was also getting deselected when I was trying to rename a file and paste text into the rename field, but this no longer happens after disabling the setting toggle switch.

Welp, it’s as simple as that, so just disable the feature in my screenshot if you’re having issues with text deselecting when pressing the left control key.