Bug 95458

Summary: option to disable new "middle click" functionality
Product: Wayland Reporter: Britt Yazel <bwyazel>
Component: libinputAssignee: Wayland bug list <wayland-bugs>
Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX QA Contact:
Severity: normal    
Priority: medium CC: peter.hutterer
Version: unspecified   
Hardware: Other   
OS: All   
Whiteboard:
i915 platform: i915 features:

Description Britt Yazel 2016-05-17 17:16:16 UTC
Would it be possible to add an option to disable the new "middle click" region on the bottom edge of my touchpad? I have never found valuable use for this section, and I find it gets in the way more often than not.

The two big annoyances thus far I have found are:
1)When I try to left or right click, I tend to hit the middle area for both, and I end up having to stretch my thumb further left and right than is comfortable to get a valid left and right click.
2)As an extension to the above issue, whenever I am typing or working with text, I will often accidentally hit the middle button and it will then paste whatever was last stored to my clipboard. Which is usually a boatload of text from a log output or something, and I have to then clear it out.

Now, I'm not saying that I don't appreciate the middle click functionality. I, however, would like not to use it, and thus a way to turn it off would be awesome. If that comes as a Gnome control center toggle or a command line argument is fine with me.
Comment 1 Peter Hutterer 2016-05-20 03:12:30 UTC
I'd say the easiest solution here would be to switch to clickfinger behaviour instead so that a single-finger click triggers a left-click, a two-finger click triggers a right click.

gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.peripherals.touchpad click-method 'fingers'
Comment 2 Britt Yazel 2016-05-20 03:41:16 UTC
Right. I recognize that there are options for me to deal with this. The suggestion was mostly for a configuration way to just turn the functionality back to how it was before.

I love when new functionality is added, but also I appreciate the option to opt out of said functionality. This is one of those rare, perhaps stubborn, occurrences in which I was totally happy with my previous way of using my touchpad, and this new option is really screwing me up. :-/

Is it uncalled for to request an option to opt out of middle click behavior?
Comment 3 Peter Hutterer 2016-05-20 06:08:41 UTC
tbh, I'd prefer things like this to be not configurable. The middle button should only be 15mm wide iirc, so unless your touchpad is tiny it really shouldn't be that likely to hit accidentally (I understand that "shouldn't be" and "is" are often two different realities :)

right now we still have middle button emulation but I plan to remove this over the next releases now that we have a fixed middle button. With the option in place it makes everything more complicated again, I need to test the version with MB emulation, without MB emulation (which is an option in itself...) etc.

I'd be interested to know your touchpad and the size of it, maybe the button is too big. But I don't think I'll add an option for that.

run the touchpad-edge-detector tool, that should tell us more (measure the physical sizes too please)
Comment 4 Britt Yazel 2016-05-27 21:21:55 UTC
My touchpad is the the one on the Dell XPS 13 9333.

How exactly do I run the touchpad-edge-detector tool?
Comment 5 Britt Yazel 2016-05-27 21:25:08 UTC
Ok got it, this is the output:

Touchpad size as listed by the kernel: 99x60mm
Calculate resolution as:
	x axis: 4069/<width in mm>
	y axis: 2471/<height in mm>

Suggested udev rule:
# <Laptop model description goes here>
evdev:name:DLL060A:00 06CB:2734:dmi:bvnDellInc.:bvrA08:bd08/31/2015:svnDellInc.:pnXPS139333:pvr:rvnDellInc.:rn07R63N:rvrA00:cvnDellInc.:ct8:cvr0.1:*
 EVDEV_ABS_00=41:4055:<x resolution>
 EVDEV_ABS_01=29:2470:<y resolution>
 EVDEV_ABS_35=41:4055:<x resolution>
 EVDEV_ABS_36=29:2470:<y resolution>
Comment 6 Peter Hutterer 2016-05-30 03:52:03 UTC
what's the physical side of the touchpad? ix the 99x60 accurate?
Comment 7 Britt Yazel 2016-06-01 18:57:16 UTC
Yes those dimensions appear to be accurate
Comment 8 Peter Hutterer 2016-06-02 06:13:10 UTC
right. sorry, I'm closing this as a WONTFIX for a couple of reasons:

* the middle button section is 15mm wide, in the center of the touchpad. That leaves you 4cm on each side for the left and the right button which is plenty enough to aim for.
* adding an option to make this configurable, deactivate it, etc. makes things inherently more complex to maintain and harder to improve in the future.

So I think your best option is to either re-train yourself to click a bit further to the left/right or switch to clickfinger.
Comment 9 Charles Oliver Nutter 2017-01-04 18:50:06 UTC
I've just moved to a Wayland setup and I have to protest this bug being closed as WONTFIX.

I have many reasons:

1. The middle click reason is still very much wide enough to accidentally click, and I find myself doing it constantly.
2. The behaviors range from annoying (Chrome bookmark folders opening ALL TABS when I just wanted to expand the folder) to destructive (middle-click paste can wipe out files, documents, text). It's a landmine.
3. I and many others coming from non-Linux platforms will only be frustrated by this new magic middle button region.
4. The old X11 synaptics driver allowed much better configuration of these regions, and did not have a middle click region by default.
5. If I did want a middle click region, 15mm is much *smaller* than I might want. As it is you have this little 1.5cm land mine that's hard to hit on purpose and easy to hit on accident.

This middle-click region really, really needs to be configurable.
Comment 10 Peter Hutterer 2017-01-04 21:15:45 UTC
fwiw, we've since hooked up the middle click button to be dependent on middle button emulation. so if you enable middle button emulation on the touchpad, the middle button area disappears and you have to press both left and right button simultaneously to get a middle click.
Comment 11 Charles Oliver Nutter 2017-01-04 22:43:42 UTC
That sounds like a pretty good way to go. I'm not concerned about having a middle click available, and if I do I'll try to wire up the trackpoint button to do it.

Unfortunately, I am not seeing middle button emulation as a setting in my current version of Gnome (3.22ish):

$ gsettings list-recursively org.gnome.desktop.peripherals.touchpad
org.gnome.desktop.peripherals.touchpad send-events 'enabled'
org.gnome.desktop.peripherals.touchpad natural-scroll true
org.gnome.desktop.peripherals.touchpad two-finger-scrolling-enabled true
org.gnome.desktop.peripherals.touchpad left-handed 'mouse'
org.gnome.desktop.peripherals.touchpad click-method 'fingers'
org.gnome.desktop.peripherals.touchpad speed -0.4779411764705882
org.gnome.desktop.peripherals.touchpad tap-to-click true
org.gnome.desktop.peripherals.touchpad edge-scrolling-enabled false

Can you tell me which release of libinput that change went into (assuming that's the right way to acquire it)?
Comment 12 Charles Oliver Nutter 2017-01-04 22:50:49 UTC
My currently-installed libinput is 1.5.3, so I'm guessing this is a setting not yet exposed in gnome?
Comment 13 Charles Oliver Nutter 2017-01-04 23:54:59 UTC
The xinput command provided here allowed me to disable the middle click area for now: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=774873#c5

This was on a Lenovo T460p, and the trackpad is device ID #6.

Looking forward to having this as a regular option.
Comment 14 Peter Hutterer 2017-01-05 00:06:11 UTC
Yeah, I was just about to link to that bug. libinput is a library used by the compositor, in this case GNOME's mutter. So you need to talk to mutter to get it to enable/disable things (via gsettings), libinput can merely provide the ability to toggle the feature, sorry.

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