Touchpad Settings (Request)

[intialonso]

This is more a request than a bug.

In the mouse settings theres no options for touchpads (vertical and horizontal scroll, tap, etc). It will be great if the option could be included in the settings app.

[jleclanche]

Accepted

[fedelibre]

+1, this would be very nice to have

[PCMan]

Does anyone know how to do that?

[fedelibre]

perhaps you can get some ispiration from gnome-control-center

[Vladimir-csp]

A humble request: while taking ideas from gnome stuff, try to avoid oversimplification. Some time ago I've tried to convince them to make decent mouse speed and acceleration settings. In the end they changed two non-working sliders into one which does magic with no way to tell where speed setting ends and acceleration setting begins.

[jleclanche]

@Vladimir-csp When making UX decisions I try to make the interface as simple as possible without removing actual functionality.

[Atalanttore]

Can you please turn off tapping by default? It's annoying and unnecessary.

[Vladimir-csp]

Touchpad settings are usually just xinput properties of the device. No need for any special treatment. IMHO this should be merged into #337

[RalfJung]

Is there any other configuration tool one could use? I tried the one from GNOME, but enabling "tap to click" there does nothing. I tried the one from KDE, but so far I was unable to even load it:

$ kcmshell5 kcm_touchpad
"kcm_touchpad" should not be loaded.
Could not find module 'kcm_touchpad'. See kcmshell5 --list for the full list of modules.

Not being able to tap to click is a pretty severe regression, compared to the DEs I used previously.

EDIT: I solved this for now by editing the Xorg configuration. Better than nothing.

[palinek]

There is a synclient cmd line tool for the synaptics. Do we want to make a GUI based on that? (like it is with setxkbmap in lxqt-config-input)

[Vladimir-csp]

There is a synclient cmd line tool for the synaptics. Do we want to make a GUI based on that? (like it is with setxkbmap in lxqt-config-input)

IMHO, not before proper xinput frontend/daemon (#337).

...some of touchpad properties are exposed via xinput anyway.

[pmattern]

Tools synclient as well as syndaemon are geared towards xf86-input-synaptics only. They don't work with any other driver like e. g. xf86-input-libinput so we shouldn't rely on them.

AFAIK the common way to tweak input device settings in realtime are Device Properties so we'd better use these as backend.
Don't know whether this has to be done via binary xinput or whether there's some library or so to access them. Also, I'm not sure which Device Properties exactly should be supported as these are completely different depending on the driver in use. libinput will probably be used under Wayland as well, synaptics is providing a lot more features for the time being, supporting both would probably mean much more work.

Also, I don't know how that whole thing will be implemented in Wayland, in particular whether the concept of Device Properties will persist.
If Wayland is relying on different concepts I'm not sure whether effort should be put into the current X Window System concepts, besides a GUI to configure touchpads is for sure a feature missing badly.

[Vladimir-csp]

Breaking it apart: there is a need for input device configuration tool. This tool would work with a range of properties, grouped in profiles which would be applied to devices.

It would be logical to generalize properties and create a list of known properties with (translatable) descriptions.

The config tool would take a list of available properties, compare it to a list of known properties, then show known ones on the 'main' tab, all other on 'advanced' tab.

Where would it take all these properties? That depends on backends. Wayland is maturing, but it is still not mainstream, nor has stable interfaces. So xinput is the thing to start with (via binary or library, does not matter).

The plus side of this approach is that it would provide GUI access to any property backend can give. In case of xinput it is very impressive list, sufficient to handle a touchpad:

$ xinput list-props 14
Device 'AlpsPS/2 ALPS GlidePoint':
    Device Enabled (137):   1
    Coordinate Transformation Matrix (139): 1.000000, 0.000000, 0.000000, 0.000000, 1.000000, 0.000000, 0.000000, 0.000000, 1.000000
    Device Accel Profile (270): -1
    Device Accel Constant Deceleration (271):   2.500000
    Device Accel Adaptive Deceleration (272):   1.000000
    Device Accel Velocity Scaling (273):    12.500000
    Synaptics Edges (294):  300, 1700, 210, 1190
    Synaptics Finger (295): 12, 15, 0
    Synaptics Tap Time (296):   180
    Synaptics Tap Move (297):   107
    Synaptics Tap Durations (298):  180, 100, 100
    Synaptics ClickPad (299):   0
    Synaptics Middle Button Timeout (300):  75
    Synaptics Two-Finger Pressure (301):    141
    Synaptics Two-Finger Width (302):   7
    Synaptics Scrolling Distance (303): 48, 48
    Synaptics Edge Scrolling (304): 0, 0, 0
    Synaptics Two-Finger Scrolling (305):   1, 1
    Synaptics Move Speed (306): 1.000000, 1.750000, 0.081934, 0.000000
    Synaptics Off (307):    0
    Synaptics Locked Drags (308):   0
    Synaptics Locked Drags Timeout (309):   5000
    Synaptics Tap Action (310): 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 2, 3
    Synaptics Click Action (311):   1, 1, 1
    Synaptics Circular Scrolling (312): 0
    Synaptics Circular Scrolling Distance (313):    0.100000
    Synaptics Circular Scrolling Trigger (314): 0
    Synaptics Circular Pad (315):   0
    Synaptics Palm Detection (316): 0
    Synaptics Palm Dimensions (317):    10, 100
    Synaptics Coasting Speed (318): 20.000000, 50.000000
    Synaptics Pressure Motion (319):    15, 80
    Synaptics Pressure Motion Factor (320): 1.000000, 1.000000
    Synaptics Grab Event Device (321):  0
    Synaptics Gestures (322):   1
    Synaptics Capabilities (323):   1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 0
    Synaptics Pad Resolution (324): 32, 25
    Synaptics Area (325):   0, 0, 0, 0
    Synaptics Noise Cancellation (326): 12, 12
    Device Product ID (260):    2, 8
    Device Node (261):  "/dev/input/event1"

Everything I wrote here is just a clarification of the concept already described in #337

[billwx]

Not sure if this is helpful but xfce recognizes both my laptop and usb mice. I always disable the former to avoid accidentally moving my cursor about when typing. With lxde/qt i have to be much more careful about not touching the trackpad. Such an option would be a great addition to a great desktop. Thanks for your consideration!

[tsujan]

With lxde/qt i have to be much more careful about not touching the trackpad

Until that option is added, if your touchpad works with Synaptics driver, you could add this to your startup:

#!/bin/bash
synclient TouchpadOff=1
exit

or to keyboard shortcuts.