Disable touchpad how?

Although I am using my USB mouse much less using i3, my touchpad on the laptop is too sensitive and acts up when my fingers are typing on the keyboard. I like to disable it completely and use USB mouse. Is there a simple command that will do this with libinput?, I would prefer not to install synaptic if possible. Editing 30-touchpad.conf to MatchIsTouchpad “off” does not seem to work.

[/code]
Section “InputClass”
Identifier “touchpad”
Driver “libinput”
MatchIsTouchpad “on”
Option “Tapping” “on”
EndSection

[code]

check if you can disable in UEFI/BIOS

Hi @gychang,

Although I don’t use, or even have a laptop and thus no touchpad, I have found this post online that seem to describe the steps pretty well:

xinput

If you do not want or cannot use synclient, you could also use xinput. The procedure is somewhat similar.

list all xinput devices: xinput

Part of the ouput could look like this:

⎡ Virtual core pointer                          id=2    [master pointer  (3)]
⎜   ↳ Virtual core XTEST pointer                id=4    [slave  pointer  (2)]
⎜   ↳ Logitech USB-PS/2 Optical Mouse           id=13   [slave  pointer  (2)]
⎜   ↳ ETPS/2 Elantech Touchpad                  id=17   [slave  pointer  (2)]

It this particular case my touchpad has id=17 and its full name is “ETPS/2 Elantech Touchpad”.

The command to set a property is xinput set-prop. The property to enable or disable the touchpad is Device Enabled, so to enable or disable it type:

Turn touchpad ON: xinput set-prop <id> "Device Enabled" 1 (where <id> is your device id, in my case 17)

Turn touchpad OFF: xinput set-prop <id> "Device Enabled" 0

Turn palm detection ON: xinput set-prop <id> "Palm Detection" 1

Turn palm detection OFF: xinput set-prop <id> "Palm Detection" 0

To query available properties: xinput list-props <id> OR xinput list-props <full-name>, this should be quite similair to synclient -l.

Links for further reading

ubuntu - wiki - input

NOTE

When setting properties through either xinput or synclient the properties are not set to the other tool. They are also not set in unity-control-center.

Hope this helps!

Thanks!, works perfect.

good idea!, unfortunately on my laptop no touchpad control…

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