GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 337367
(Re-)Add checkbox for disable touchpad
Last modified: 2012-08-23 09:02:15 UTC
I cannot explain enough how much I hate my touchpad. I hate everything about it, and even as I type this bug, my thumb drags accross it and moves the mouse, page, etc. If I plug in an external mouse, I do not want my touchpad to function at all! If anyone out there thinks they need to be able to use 2 mice at the same time, can we at least have a preference to switch between the 2? Other information: Have you guys looked at the Max OSX mouse preferences? They've addressed this problem quite nicely with a single checkbox that says: "Ignore Trackpad when External Mouse is Plugged in". Click that button, and it's done ---------------------- Also filed under: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=155637
This would probably require something to listen to hal for changes in input devices, and then tell X to ignore specific devices (such as touchpad) as a result. Marking bug as confirmed as it would be a useful feature to add to the mouse preferences if possible.
Trackpads are very annoying on laptops if you're not using them. While typing your fingers/thumb can accidentally hit it, causing your cursor to move and messing up all your text. OSX does this fabulously. My
An easy alternative could be to have a normal 'disable the trackpad' option in the mouse preferences. This would be a simple interface to synclient TouchpadOff=1 (see http://ubuntu.wordpress.com/2006/03/24/disable-synaptics-touchpad/). A problem is that someone might be without a mouse, and would have no way to turn back on the trackpad, unless they get into heavy command line usage, which they would have no way of knowing.
I have a solution. I have create this simple programme that monitors the system dbus looking for a mouse. When a mouse is plugged in, the trackpad is disabled using the synclient command, when it's removed, the trackpad is enabled. <a href="http://blog.technomancy.org/2007/05/05/turn-off-the-trackpad/">http://blog.technomancy.org/2007/05/05/turn-off-the-trackpad/</a> Add it to your gnome startup programmes.
Yes, get's my vote! It's not too annoying, but it would be nice to have such an option in GNOME default. I know that Windows has this functionality for years.
Just FYI, the proposed configuration interface to gnome-mouse-properties adds a "disable touchpad while typing" checkbox, which would reduce the issues addressed in Comment #2. http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=154029
There's no way to reliably identify whether or not an extra mouse has been plugged in on PCs - Macs can do this because they only have to worry about USB.
I don't think you can make this distinction between Mac and PC because Windows has the feature requested here.
If you've got any suggestions on how to identify a muxed ps/2 input and distinguish it from an integrated trackpoint, that'd be great. We don't currently have the ability to do that.
I have no idea how Windows does it, sorry.
For a couple of releases, we had a checkbox to disable touchpads in the mouse preferences. It's disappeared in more recent versions (probably due to a bug, I did not investigate). This bug is to make sure we can disable the touchpad in the mouse preferences for GNOME 3.
*** Bug 581035 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
From bug 581035, we'd need to make sure that either the "disable touchpad" option isn't available when there's no mice, or that there's a clear label mentioning how to re-enable it with the keyboard.
*** Bug 613472 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
[Removing GNOME3.0 target as decided in release-team meeting on March 03, 2011. This report has an "important" categorisation for GNOME3.0 but is not considered a hard blocker. For querying use the corresponding whiteboard entry added.]
[Restoring accidential removal of whiteboard entry.]
There is no way this is happening for 3.0.
Sorry about doing a "me too" post, but is there a chance that a "Disable touchpad" could be added? My touch pad is really driving me crazy :-(
I think the bug is fixed along with: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=677206
Fixed in the new design for the mouse panel in GNOME 3.6.
*** Bug 675329 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***