GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 774873
Would like a method to enable/disable touchpad middle-click functionality
Last modified: 2018-01-24 15:18:16 UTC
I have an HP Spectre x360 (Kaby Lake) running Fedora 25 with wayland and libinput. The machine has a really wide touchpad, and I find myself constantly hitting the virtual middle-click button at the bottom of the pad by accident, with irritating and often destructive results (text selection replaced with clipboard contents, closed the tab I meant to switch to, etc). I filed a bug on libinput (https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=98808) and the maintainer Peter Hutterer says that the interface itself exposes the ability to enable or touchpad disable middle-click emulation, but it's up to clients to display it to users. So, as a GNOME user, I humbly request a setting to disable the virtual middle-click touchpad button. You could even put it in GNOME Tweak Tool or the dconf editor, I don't care, but please expose this setting *somewhere* before it drives me completely insane!
Moving to gnome-tweak-tool since that's where the other "advanced" libinput configuration lives, like click behavior (e.g. areas/clickfinger).
For more specifics: I would make this a setting to toggle middle button emulation on a device where available rather than making it about the touchpad middle button. This way it maps nicely to libinput and if we ever have a setting to explicitly disable the middle button we can handle that separately.
I was thinking of basically exposing a thing that sets LIBINPUT_CONFIG_MIDDLE_EMULATION_ENABLED or LIBINPUT_CONFIG_MIDDLE_EMULATION_DISABLED. Does that sound right? Of course looking through the gnome-tweak-tool code, it seems like a relevant dconf setting needs to be created first (unless I'm just missing it) before gnome-tweak-tool can be changed to connect to it.
yep, that's what I meant. gnome-tweak-tool is merely a fancy GUI to toggle dconf options, you'll need to add the dconf setting first and you also need to update mutter to handle the setting as well so it feeds down to libinput. In fact, the tweak-tool change is the last one you can do :)
Workaround: xinput --set-button-map <touchpad id> 1 1 3 Mmmmmmm, so much nicer now.
note that this changes *any* middle button from the touchpad to be button 1. This would thus also affect a three-finger tap-to-click.
Indeed. I don't use tap-to-click, or a software touchpad middle mouse button at all, in fact.
I filed 789721 separately, partly to point out that this workaround isn't available with wayland.
-- GitLab Migration Automatic Message -- This bug has been migrated to GNOME's GitLab instance and has been closed from further activity. You can subscribe and participate further through the new bug through this link to our GitLab instance: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-tweaks/issues/82.