[ltp] Disabling moving/tapping touchpad but leave scrolling?

Paul RIVIER linux-thinkpad@linux-thinkpad.org
Wed, 19 Jul 2006 23:53:14 +0200


Hi Jiang,

I can not help you, but I take advantage of your post to paste a similar
question I asked a few weeks ago.
Hoping it will lead to even better experience for thinkpad users :)

*******
This remains to me an old idea, about how to make the touchpad useful.
Indeed, I really prefer to use the trackpoint to move the pointer, and
the touchpad became so annoying because of unintentional touch that I
disactivated in the bios, and I know a few others folks that did the
same. So this device has simply no use for many people.
Well, now what I would really like in a kind of smart driver for the
touchpad doing :
- If anything is happening on the keyboard or the trackpoint, deactivate
touchpad (I have heard that already exist)
- Configurable movements / action bindings, typically : move from left
to right go to workspace right; move up/down scrolls. And why not if
possible, fancy gesture recognition, like 'Z' closes the windows,
although I believe only straightforward moves can be really useful.

Does anyone know if there is a work in progress around that ? I am quiet
a poor C hacker and know almost nothing about writing a driver for linux
kernel or for X. But I can script the userland part, say, a Desktop
daemon for gnome / kde / whatever to swap workspaces and additionnal
good feature ideas.

Finally, this work could even be used on laptops with no trackpoint,
using for exemple a modifier key, or turn it on if a mouse is plugged.

Any idea ?

***********

Hope we get more success this time :)


Paul


Jiang Qian wrote:

>Hi All:
>I use trackpoint exclusively on my T43, therefore I'm annoyed when I 
>accidentally touch the touchpad and cause the mouse to move wildly.  
>However I do find vertical and horizontal scrolling with touchpad edge 
>useful when viewing large pictures or webpages.
>
>Is there a way to disable the synaptic touchpad so that it does not move 
>the mouse nor tap to create click, but still able to use as a scroll 
>wheel on the edge?  I'm using Ubuntu Hoary 5.04 with custom 6.15.7 
>kernel and Xorg 6.8.2 synaptic touchpad version 0.13.6
>
>Thanks in advance for insights.
>
>Jiang
>  
>