Bug 95458

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'

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?

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)

My touchpad is the the one on the Dell XPS 13 9333.

How exactly do I run the touchpad-edge-detector tool?

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>

what's the physical side of the touchpad? ix the 99x60 accurate?

Yes those dimensions appear to be accurate

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.

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.

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.

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)?

My currently-installed libinput is 1.5.3, so I'm guessing this is a setting not yet exposed in gnome?

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.

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.