How to disable taps as mouse clicks on touchpad?

[rideburton56]

Hi All,

I have a dell inspiron 700m which has a touchpad along with two buttons below it. In most systems, by default the OS will detect a tap of the touchpad as a mouse click. I hate that, I am not sure if ifs my oaf like fingers, but im always clicking by accident while typing. In windows as well as Ubuntu, it allowed me to disable reading a tap as a click, but I cant seem to find that option in System Settings in Kubuntu. Is there a way?

[Snowhog]

Re: How to disable touchpad taps as mouse clicks?

Re: How to disable touchpad?

[kubicle]

Re: How to disable touchpad taps as mouse clicks?

There is a relatively new systemsettings module for touchpads that you can install, but unfortunately it's not in the main repositories yet, though it might be available from ppas.
http://www.kde-apps.org/content/show...content=113335

There are also various other tools available, like touchfreeze and gsynaptics (gpointing-device-settings) from gnome.

I simply use synclient myself, more info on that you can find here (and on other threads):
http://kubuntuforums.net/forums/inde...opic=3106355.0

[rideburton56]

Re: How to disable touchpad taps as mouse clicks?

Re: How to disable touchpad?

I would like to disable the "tap pad to click" feature, not the whole touchpad. Is there a way to use the gnome control panel for this?

[Snowhog]

Re: How to disable taps as mouse clicks on touchpad?

CrunchBang Linux Forums » Tips, Tricks & Scripts » disabling touchpad tap-to-click

[rideburton56]

Re: How to disable taps as mouse clicks on touchpad?

Hmm.... Never added a ppa before, but also never had to futz around with a hal / xorg file. When I get home I will try editing my that file. I will post back with results. Your searching skills are way better than mine snowhog, I even checked ubuntuforums. Thanks!

[Snowhog]

Re: How to disable taps as mouse clicks on touchpad?

You're welcome. Do let us know how it goes. REMEMBER: Before making changes to system files - BACK THEM UP FIRST! (make a copy of it).

[kubicle]

Re: How to disable touchpad taps as mouse clicks?

Re: How to disable touchpad?

I would like to disable the "tap pad to click" feature, not the whole touchpad. Is there a way to use the gnome control panel for this?

In case you missed it in my link, you can disable just tapping by using "touchpadoff=2" (no tapping) instead of "touchpadoff=1" (touchpad disabled).

[chipbennett]

Re: How to disable touchpad taps as mouse clicks?

There is a relatively new systemsettings module for touchpads that you can install, but unfortunately it's not in the main repositories yet, though it might be available from ppas.
http://www.kde-apps.org/content/show...content=113335

There are also various other tools available, like touchfreeze and gsynaptics (gpointing-device-settings) from gnome.

I simply use synclient myself, more info on that you can find here (and on other threads):
http://kubuntuforums.net/forums/inde...opic=3106355.0

I concur: if the issue is the touchpad detecting a "tap" while typing, then synclient is the ideal solution. (I like being able to click-to-tap when not typing.)

[Guest]

Re: How to disable touchpad taps as mouse clicks?

There is a relatively new systemsettings module for touchpads that you can install, but unfortunately it's not in the main repositories yet, though it might be available from ppas.
http://www.kde-apps.org/content/show...content=113335

I just installed this for exactly the same reason (to disable the touchpad) and although I got a few warnings when I compiled it, it works very well, and is very well integrated with the rest of the KDE system settings.

[rideburton56]

Re: How to disable touchpad taps as mouse clicks?

Re: How to disable touchpad?

I would like to disable the "tap pad to click" feature, not the whole touchpad. Is there a way to use the gnome control panel for this?

In case you missed it in my link, you can disable just tapping by using "touchpadoff=2" (no tapping) instead of "touchpadoff=1" (touchpad disabled).

I must have totally missed that when searching the posted topics. Thanks! Am i running that in the terminal?

[kubicle]

Re: How to disable touchpad taps as mouse clicks?

Re: How to disable touchpad?

I would like to disable the "tap pad to click" feature, not the whole touchpad. Is there a way to use the gnome control panel for this?

In case you missed it in my link, you can disable just tapping by using "touchpadoff=2" (no tapping) instead of "touchpadoff=1" (touchpad disabled).

I must have totally missed that when searching the posted topics. Thanks! Am i running that in the terminal?

You can test the functionality with running 'synclient touchpadoff=2' in the terminal, but I'd recommend creating a script to toggle tapping, you can then create a .desktop launcher and/or keyboard shortcut to run the script for easier usage.

Here's the instructions from my earlier post in http://kubuntuforums.net/forums/inde...opic=3106355.0:
For synclient to work, you need to set SHMConfig to "on" in hal input policy, you can create an fdi file (which is the "hal -way" of handling xorg options), Here's a sample /etc/hal/fdi/policy/15-my_synaptics_options.fdi:

?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <!-- -*- SGML -*- -->
<deviceinfo version="0.2">
 <device> 
  <match key="info.product" string="SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad">
   <merge key="input.x11_options.SHMConfig" type="string">true</merge>
   <merge key="input.x11_options.TouchpadOff" type="string">2</merge>
  </match>
 </device>
</deviceinfo>

The first key turns SHMConfig on, and the second key sets the initial status of the touchpad to "no tapping" (The available values are 0=Touchpad on, 1=Touchpad off and 2=Tapping off)

After SHMConfig is on (you may need to restart hal), you can toggle touchpad settings with:
Code:
synclient TouchpadOff=[value]

Here's a sample script to toggle between "Touchpad on" and "No tapping":

#!/bin/sh

STATUS=`synclient -l 2>/dev/null | awk '/TouchpadOff/ {print $3}'`
if [ $STATUS -eq "0" ]; then
  synclient TouchpadOff=2
else
  synclient TouchpadOff=0
fi

Save the script somewhere (/usr/local/bin/tp_toggle, for example) and make it executable. Test that it works by running 'tp_toggle' in konsole. Now you can create a .desktop link (icon in kmenu with kmenueditor, for example...use 'tp_toggle' as the command to run) to run it and set a keyboard shortcut for quick toggling.