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Why didnt anyone tell me this earlier??

Try this if you feel like poking your X config by hand and if you use a laptop with a touchpad.

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Synaptics Touchpad"
Driver "synaptics"
Option "SendCoreEvents" "true"
Option "Device" "/dev/psaux"
Option "Protocol" "auto-dev"
EndSection

So, what does it do then?

  • It adds scroll-areas to right and bottom edges of your touchpad, so you can scroll as if you had a wheelmouse, by moving your finger on the edge of the pad.
  • It also seems to inhibit movement if you touch the pad accidentally with the edge of your hand while typing.

Nice. Something that should just be more widely used as default. (more info here)

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 5th, 2005 at 00:43 and is filed under software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.

10 Responses to “Why didnt anyone tell me this earlier??”

  1. /home/bojordan/journal » Blog Archive » Finally a use for a T40 trackpad says:
    Jan. 5. 2005 at 00:16

    [...] Joel’s college advice Finally a use for a T40 trackpad In this post, Tuomas Kuosmanen remarks that setting up the tou [...]

  2. Quinn says:
    Jan. 5. 2005 at 01:34

    The synaptics driver doesn’t work on all laptops, though. :/ Unfortunately, my old Vaio is one of them.

  3. sil says:
    Jan. 5. 2005 at 02:27

    Ha! I thought exactly the same thing, “wow! why didn’t anyone tell me about this?”. http://www.kryogenix.org/days/2004/10/02/synaptics was my note on it, in much the same amazed tone of voice as yours :)

  4. J.B. Nicholson-Owens says:
    Jan. 5. 2005 at 07:27

    Fedora Core 3 and Ubuntu enabled this without my doing anything special. I also have two pseudo buttons on the bottom of the trackpad. And I hate them all; maybe if this had a control panel where I could turn on specific features and adjust where the fake buttons are, I might like this.

    I just want a trackpad with no special areas like I had in FC2 and FC1. Tap-click for a left mouse click is okay, but nothing else.

    Is it possible to change the configuration of the trackpad on a per-user basis so some users can have the features and others can turn it off?

  5. Tuomas says:
    Jan. 5. 2005 at 10:43

    yes, it can be configured, check the driver site. I think it had some info. I’ll check when i get back to a computer.. Lynx with a cellphone is a bit painful ;)

  6. Kalle Vahlman says:
    Jan. 5. 2005 at 12:48

    You can also tap the pad with more than one finger to produce different button presses (two for the middle button (2) and
    three for the right button (3)). It works out-of-the-box on Ubuntu as said, and even on a -97 Presario notebook, so it’s not exactly
    a new feature ;)

  7. Danilo Segan says:
    Jan. 6. 2005 at 03:23

    Those are so called “synaptic touchpads” (smart, eh? :). I’ve figured that was common knowledge, since that’s the first thing I added as soon as I got the laptop I’m using now, and never had a computer with touchpad before. :)

  8. Chris Hollenbeck says:
    Jan. 6. 2005 at 08:14

    I also came across some interesting settings you can enable such as circular scrolling and a way to disable the touchpad while you type.
    http://gentoo-wiki.com/HARDWARE_Synaptics_Touchpad

  9. Logan Rathbone says:
    Jan. 7. 2005 at 08:38

    I don’t know but I think stuff like that would annoy me. My laptop had that enabled at one point, but I ended up disabling all that junk and just using it as a regular PS mouse after some frustration. The most annoying thing is tapping the pad to simulate mouse clicks… I already have real mouse buttons for that! jeez!