Touchy touchpad
I find the touchpad on my laptop too sensitive; when I’m typing, I sometimes accidentally move the mouse pointer so that the text I type goes somewhere completely different. I don’t want to get rid of the tap to click feature as I find it very useful, but can I either reduce the sensitivity or even turn it off temporarily when I am typing? I’m using Kubuntu 15.04. Chris Collins If your trackpad uses the synaptics driver, and the majority do, you can use the Touchpad tab in the Input Devices section of KDE’s system Settings. There’s an option to disable the touchpad while typing, but I’ve had mixed results with this. The problem is the timeout: set it too short (like the 250ms default) and any slight pause in typing awakens the touchpad, but set it too long and you have to wait before you can perform any mouse actions after typing. Experiment with this to see if it works for you, otherwise there’s an option to set hotkeys to enable and disable the touchpad manually, which work very well provided you remember to use them.
For users of other desktops without such an option, or if your trackpad does not use synaptics, you can turn it on and off with the xinput command. The first thing to do is run xinput in a terminal with no arguments, it will show information about your input devices: Virtual core pointer > Virtual core XTEST pointer > SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad
Once you have the name of the trackpad, you can use xinput to turn it off and on: $ xinput --disable “SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad” $ xinput --enable “SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad”
If you bind each of these commands to a hotkey combination using your desktop’s settings (SystemSettings > Shortcuts > Custom Shortcuts in KDE 5) you can turn the touchpad off and on at will. If you would rather have a single hotkey that toggles it on and off, save this script somewhere, setting TP to the name given by xinput above, make it executable and bind it to a key (test it in a terminal first). #!/bin/sh TP="SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad” if xinput --list “$TP” | grep -q ‘This device is disabled’; then
xinput --enable “$TP” else
xinput --disable “$TP” fi
It’s a simple script that checks the output of xinput --list to see if the trackpad is already disabled. If it is the script re-enables it, otherwise the trackpad is disabled. This should work with any distribution (distro), any desktop environment and any trackpad – or any other input device if you feel the need to disable the mouse or keyboard for some reason (although if you disable the keyboard, don’t rely on a hotkey to re-enable it!).