Bug 100859

Summary:	libinput incompatible with touchpad-indicator ?
Product:	Wayland	Reporter:	Simon <simonhf>
Component:	libinput	Assignee:	Wayland bug list <wayland-bugs>
Status:	RESOLVED NOTABUG	QA Contact:
Severity:	normal
Priority:	medium	CC:	peter.hutterer
Version:	unspecified
Hardware:	x86-64 (AMD64)
OS:	Linux (All)
Whiteboard:
i915 platform:		i915 features:

Description Simon 2017-04-27 19:49:24 UTC

I'm running Ubuntu 16.04 on a Dell Precision 5520 laptop. The touchpad is shockingly sensitive so I tried installing touchpad-indicator for its feature to enable and disable the touchpad via a keyboard shortcut. This made the laptop usable and the touchpad less annoying. Then after more Googling I decided to try out libinput and this makes the touchpad very useful and not so jittery when typing etc. However, touchpad-indicator now refuses to startup. I suspect it wants to find a synaptics interface / driver somehow. I'm missing the feature of touchpad indicator to define a keyboard short cut to toggle the touchpad on and off. Is there a way to get touchpad indicator and libinput to play nicely together? Or is there an alternative way to disable the touchpad via shortcut when using libinput.

Another feature I'd like to use from touchpad indicator is the feature to automatically disable the touchpad when a mouse is attached to the laptop. Is there a way to do this with libinput?

Thanks for reading this.

Comment 1 Peter Hutterer 2017-04-28 00:16:13 UTC

see this entry here: https://wayland.freedesktop.org/libinput/doc/latest/faq.html#faq_synclient

there's no shortcut, but I guess one could modify touchpad indicator to disable sendevents on the touchpad. but let's be honest, the main reason touchpad-indicator is needed is because palm detection on the touchpad was terrible, libinput is trying to fix *that* problem so that the extra program isn't needed.

libinput supports disabling the touchpad on external mouse, see the sendevents configuration:
https://wayland.freedesktop.org/libinput/doc/latest/group__config.html
it's exported as property by the libinput xorg driver

Comment 2 Simon 2017-04-28 02:26:53 UTC

Thanks, Peter. I followed your link and found this ENUM:

   LIBINPUT_CONFIG_SEND_EVENTS_DISABLED_ON_EXTERNAL_MOUSE

How do I use that to configure libinput to disable the touchpad while my bluetooth mouse is connected?

P.S.: You have a good point that touchpad-indicator is maybe not necessary when using libinput. So far I have found libinput to be excellent in stopping touchpad jitter :-)

Comment 3 Peter Hutterer 2017-04-28 03:08:45 UTC

yeah, that's the one, check the libinput(4) man page for how the properties/xorg.conf options map

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