Can I prevent "Disable touchpad while typing" from affecting mouse movements?
- From: Philip Durbin <philipdurbin@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 05 May 2012 22:43:52 -0400
Hello!
After using GNOME 2 for 5 years on a workstation I recently switched to a laptop *and* to GNOME 3.
I realized I kept expressing frustration with GNOME 3 but really the root of my frustration had more to do with the touchpad on my laptop.
I figured out a workaround to my problem last night and posted a question and answer combination to a forum. It's gotten a pretty positive response so far, based on upvotes, so I thought I'd copy and paste it here. If I should be sending feedback like this to some other mailing list, please let me know! Thanks for everyone's hard work on GNOME!
Phil
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Originally posted to http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/37962/can-i-prevent-disable-touchpad-while-typing-from-affecting-mouse-movements
Question: Can I prevent "Disable touchpad while typing" from affecting mouse movements?
When I click my name in the upper right, then click "System Settings", then "Mouse and Touchpad", and then "Disable touchpad while typing" it affects affects my mouse movements. I have to wait two seconds before I can move the pointer with the touchpad.
I like the "Disable touchpad while typing" feature in general, as it prevents me from accidentally raising another window instead of the one I'm typing into, but can I have the feature only affect taps of the touchpad and not my attempts to move the mouse around?
I'm using GNOME 3.2.1 on Fedora 16
----
My Answer:
On my ThinkPad X220T running GNOME 3 it's pretty easy to be typing along and accidentally bump the touchpad, causing some window other than the one you're typing into to be raised.
Ostensibly, the solution to this problem is to click your name in the upper right, then click "System Settings", then "Mouse and Touchpad", and then "Disable touchpad while typing" under as shown the screenshot at http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Synaptics_TouchPad_driver_for_X .
This will cause `syndaemon` ( http://linuxcommand.org/man_pages/syndaemon1.html ) to start up with the following options:
syndaemon -i 2.0 -K -R
Here's what the options mean:
-i <idle-time>
How many seconds to wait after the last key press before enabling the touchpad. (default is 2.0s).
-k Ignore modifier keys when monitoring keyboard activity.
-K Like -k but also ignore Modifier+Key combos.
-R Use the XRecord extension for detecting keyboard activity instead of polling the keyboard state.
Having syndaemon running with those options eliminates the original problem, but it absolutely kills my productivity because the `-t` option is **not** enabled:
-t Only disable tapping and scrolling, not mouse movements, in response to keyboard activity.
Without `-t`, as soon as I stop typing and try to move the pointer, I can't. I have to wait 2 full seconds before the pointer will move.
Now, back at that "Mouse and Touchpad" interface, I do not see any way to configure which options are given to `syndaemon` and from what I can tell, the options are hard coded:
http://git.gnome.org/browse/gnome-settings-daemon/tree/plugins/mouse/gsd-mouse-manager.c?id=5ee48ce8aa66f6c4fdc4aa2c07bc03bdb83bcb65#n540
The solution is twofold. I can't abide `syndaemon` with its default options, so I leave "Disable touchpad while typing" unchecked. Then, to get `syndaemon` to start with the options I want, I run `gnome-session-properties` to open the "Startup Applications Preferences" dialog. From there, I click Add, fill in a name (I called mine "0pdurbin-disable-touchpad-while-typing" so it would appear at the top), and a command, which for me is the following:
syndaemon -i 1.0 -K -R -t
Again, the major change is the addition of `-t` so `syndaemon` doesn't paralyze my pointer, but while I was in there I reduced the idle time to one second.
I hope this helps someone because this was driving me crazy.
To avoid using a GUI tool like `gnome-session-properties` it looks like you could set up a file like this, which was created in my case:
[pdurbin@tabby ~]$ cat ~/.config/autostart/syndaemon.desktop
[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Exec=syndaemon -i 1.0 -K -R -t
Hidden=false
X-GNOME-Autostart-enabled=true
Name[en_US]=0pdurbin-disable-touchpad-while-typing
Name=0pdurbin-disable-touchpad-while-typing
Comment[en_US]=
Comment=
[pdurbin@tabby ~]$
Incidentally, this seems to be a pretty complete list of applications that are autostarted, the ones listed in `gnome-session-properties`: `find /etc/xdg/autostart /usr/share/autostart /usr/share/gdm/autostart/ /usr/share/gnome/autostart`
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