emacs in gnome-terminal on ubuntu 20.04 - Stop the trackpad from bouncing my cursor!

Question

While typing, every time I hit the trackpad in just the wrong way, my cursor jumps from one point to another in my emacs buffer. This is the scroll motion that occurs as a result of two fingers on the track-pad, but while typing, sometimes the root of my thumb triggers that scrolling action. I don't need that in emacs. How can I turn it off?

Answer 1

You can try disabling the mouse completely in Emacs only, using package disable-mouse: https://github.com/purcell/disable-mouse

Answer 2

I had this, and it drove me nuts. You may have found references to settings you can try, for example, with synaptics (if you have a synaptics touchpad) to suppress brushes with the palm of the hand that move the cursor. I have to say none of these have ever worked for me fully satisfactorily.

Edit One quick way to do this in Emacs itself would be to add (global-unset-key [mouse-1]) in your config. This will unbind the default command mouse-set-point. Emacs will complain about an undefined command if you accidentally tap, but your cursor should stop jumping about. You may find you need to unbind other mouse gestures or mode-specific bindings.

Original answer I am more satisfied by simply manually turning the trackpad completely off in Emacs, since I'm usually in Emacs for a while. I then bind this to a global Ubuntu shortcut to toggle the trackpad on and off.

This can be done using xinput (M-x woman xinput). It needs to be called several times:

1. to identify the touchpad's id
2. to detect whether the touchpad is enabled (list-props)
3. to toggle it off or on (set-prop)

You can do this your scripting language of choice. Here's my fairly verbose ruby toggletouch script, which lives in .local/bin.

#!/usr/bin/env ruby

# Just a little script to toggle the touchpad completely on or off.
touchpad = `xinput`.lines.grep(/touchpad/i).first

unless touchpad && touchpad =~ /id=(\d+)/
  raise "Can't identify touchpad input"
end

tp_id = $1

status = `xinput list-props #{tp_id}`.lines.grep(/Enabled/).first

unless status && status =~ /([01])\s*$/
  raise "Can't identify status"
end

stat = $1

if stat == "1"
  `xinput set-prop #{tp_id} "Device Enabled" 0`
else
  `xinput set-prop #{tp_id} "Device Enabled" 1`
end

Bind this to a spare key with Ubuntu's Keyboard Shortcuts. You can also look into unclutter, which can be installed using apt, which provides ways to hide the mouse cursor when it's inactive.

Answer 3

FWIW I use the following:

# See `man synaptics' for details of option "TouchpadOff".
# 0   Touchpad is enabled
# 1   Touchpad is switched off (physical clicks still work)
# 2   Only tapping and scrolling is switched off
synclient TouchpadOff=2

My touchpad has physical buttons, so there's absolutely no need for it to also interpret other things as button clicks; and similarly I have perfectly satisfactory ways of scrolling that can't happen by accident. The touchpad is useful for moving the mouse cursor around, though (if I don't have a mouse plugged in), so I keep that part enabled.