Disabling TouchPad on Ubuntu 18.04 (Temporarily)

Question

I was using Ubuntu 16.04 on my System76 Oryx laptop. The trackpad is very sensitive so I used to disable it using Fn+F1. That is not working anymore in 18.04. I looked around and found:

synclient TouchpadOff=1 

When I set that it seemed to work for a second then reset...

$ synclient TouchpadOff=0
$ synclient | grep TouchpadOff
    TouchpadOff             = 0
$ synclient | grep TouchpadOff
    TouchpadOff             = 1

I also found:

xinput set-prop "SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad" "Device Enabled" 0

But that seems more permanent. When I tried to set back to 1, it remains off. Seems I need to reboot now to turn it back on. I used to be able to toggle with Fn+F1.

Answer 1

Have you tried to install Touchpad Indicator

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:atareao/atareao
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install touchpad-indicator

it will

• Disable / Enable touchpad with indicator menu or keyboard shortcut.

• Disable touchpad when mouse is plugged.

• Disable touchpad while typing.

and i think it will fix the "work for a second" problem

Hope it helps

Answer 2

I'm assuming you want to disable the trackpad because of its annoying scrolling and clicking behavior (yeah, I know what happens when you assume: you make an ASS out of U and ME, but it wouldn't be the first time).

I, also, just upgraded from 16.04 to 18.04, and found my trackpad behavior suboptimal with seemingly random scrolling and mouse clicks even though I had disabled the scrolling and mouse click in the System Settings GUI.

Basically, I just wanted to be able to position the cursor with the trackpad and nothing else. Here's what I found solved the problem. First, get the device id from xinput:

% xinput list

You should see the trackpad with it's ID. Mine looks like:

⎡ Virtual core pointer                      id=2    [master pointer  (3)]
⎜   ↳ Virtual core XTEST pointer                id=4    [slave  pointer  (2)]
⎜   ↳ TPPS/2 IBM TrackPoint                     id=13   [slave  pointer  (2)]
⎜   ↳ SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad                id=12   [slave  pointer  (2)]

with id=12. List the touchpad properites with the command:

%  xinput --list-props 12

The relevant properties are "Two-Finger Scrolling", "Edge Scrolling", and "Tap Time", with property IDs 314, 313, and 305 respectively. Assuming your property IDs match mine, disable these with the commands:

% xinput set-prop 12 305 0
% xinput set-prop 12 313 0 0 0 
% xinput set-prop 12 314 0 0

and now your trackpad should provide only mouse pointer position. If your property IDs are different then use yours.