touchpad tap-to-click response delayed .5 seconds

[Mike]

Binary package hint: xserver-xorg-input-mouse

This almost seems related to bug # 54191, but I can't reproduce it the way that bug states. I'm running Karmic Koala fully updated and just enabled "Enable mouse clicks with touchpad" using the gnome-mouse-properties GUI. While it now accepts left-clicks by tapping the touchpad, it seems to take about 1/2 seconds for it to respond. The left mouse hard-buttons (above and below the touchpad) still respond immediately.

hardware is Latitude D630
Synaptics Touchpad

[Bence Balint (kraxor)]

I think that's just fine. If the touchpad responded immediately, you wouldn't be able to move the pointer, because all taps would result in a left-click, right?

Or did just I miss something? :)

[Mike (bild85)]

I have used touchpads to click using several different laptops in both Linux and Windows and it usually reacts immediately. And no, it does not result in interpreting a mouse movement as a left-click. It only registers a click if you touch and release in the same position, not if you slide your finger. Even so, if this is intentional change this bug to a feature request so I can adjust the delay to fit my preference. But as I stated, in my experience this is not normal behavior.

[Bence Balint (kraxor)]

Perhaps the delay is used to separate single clicks, double clicks and drag-and-drop operations?

By the way, have you tried to configure the synaptics driver manually? See 'man synaptics' for details, you might find something useful there. For example, the section below might be relevant:

Option "FastTaps" "boolean"
Makes the driver react faster to a single tap, but also makes double clicks caused by double tapping slower.

Again, I don't think it's a bug, but maybe I don't get your problem. (I also use synaptics, and I've noticed the delay when single-clicking by tapping, but I think that's more a feature then a bug.)

[nfsd (in4mer+launchpad)]

I also find this regression frustrating and unemulated elsewhere. While I think that user interface progress/change is a good thing, changing something fundamental like this without either making it opt-in, or giving people an opt-out is disingenuous at best.

My machine is slow enough without it being made even slower through software delays.

Please assign as whatever necessary to bring the old useability back.

[eremos (hjbotha)]

This is indeed very annoying. I've tried to adjust things via xinput but with no luck, not all of the same options seem to be available as through the old Shared Memory config method.

There are a couple of posts about this issue on the forum but with no solution.

I don't know whether the driver or something else would need to be changed but something like the following behaviour would be ideal:

First scenario: Double/Triple Tap
User taps (down and up within TapTimeout). ButtonDown happens immediately, but it waits TapDuration before sending ButtonUp. This gives the user time to tap again. If the user releases within TapTimeout, it sends another TapDuration tap, which again gives the user time to tap a third time.

Second scenario: Tap and Drag
User taps (down and up within TapTimeout). ButtonDown happens immediately, but it waits TapDuration before sending ButtonUp. This gives the user time to put his finger back on the touchpad, and if he doesn't lift it within TapTimeout, any movement from then on is treated as a drag. Depending on whether the DragLockTimeout, the drag ends immediately when the user lifts his finger, or
after a delay.

I guess the current situation is that the driver decides what the user is doing before executing any action (is he tapping, doubletapping, dragging), whereas what we're asking for is that the driver decides *while* the action is taking place.

[Gursimran singh (simar)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. We are sorry that we do not always have the capacity to look at all reported bugs in a timely manner. There have been many changes in Ubuntu since that time you reported the bug and your problem may have been fixed with some of the updates. If you could test the current Ubuntu stable release(maverick ubuntu 10.10), this would help us a lot. If you can test it, and it is still an issue, we would appreciate if you could upload updated logs by running apport-collect <bug #>, and any other logs that are relevant for this particular issue.

[Sébastien Giguère (samoul)]

Architecture: i386
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DRM.card0.VGA.1:
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DistroRelease: Ubuntu 10.10
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu-Netbook 10.04 "Lucid Lynx" - Release i386 (20100429.4)
MachineType: Acer AO532h
Package: xserver-xorg-input-synaptics 1.2.2-2ubuntu5
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glxinfo: Error: [Errno 2] No such file or directory
system:
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[Sébastien Giguère (samoul)]

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[Sébastien Giguère (samoul)]

I do have Ubuntu netbook remix 10.10 fully updated, the bug is still there. After some googling i did found a work around. When enabling fasttap (in terminal: synclient fasttaps=1) tapping is much more responsible. Otherwise the delay of approx. .5 second is still very annoying. Hope all the data i just sent will help you figure the source of this strange bug! If you need anything else, let me know!

[Mike (bild85)]

I am (thankfully!) not experiencing this on my current hardware:
MacBook 6,2 with 10.10

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for xserver-xorg-input-synaptics (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]

[Akdor 1154 (akdor1154)]

this bug still affects oneric... very fed up with this, it can make some games nigh unplayable. FastTaps does improve the situation, but it's still very slow compared with Windows 7's behaviour on the same laptop. There must be a better way of detecting taps vs clicks vs movements, as the Windows driver can do this perfectly naturally.

my device:

I: Bus=0011 Vendor=0002 Product=0008 Version=7321
N: Name="AlpsPS/2 ALPS GlidePoint"
P: Phys=isa0060/serio1/input0
S: Sysfs=/devices/platform/i8042/serio1/input/input7
U: Uniq=
H: Handlers=mouse1 event7
B: PROP=0
B: EV=b
B: KEY=420 70000 0 0 0 0
B: ABS=1000003

[nfsd (in4mer+launchpad)]

If you're using a synaptics touchpad, I actually worked around this by adjusting the completely insane default settings that X is set up with. Here's the config I run when I log into a new X session:

syn RightEdge 911
syn BottomEdge 670
syn MaxTapTime 250
syn BMaxTapMove 10
syn SingleTapTimeout 300
syn ClickTime 100
syn MaxDoubleTapTime 500
syn HorizEdgeScroll 0
syn SHMConfig true
syn AccelFactor .5
syn MinSpeed 0.8
syn MaxSpeed 0.8
syn ScrollButtonRepeat 50

This gives me right-side scrolling, a very responsive click, somewhat sensitive touchpad movement, and a lower acceleration factor than I recall X coming with. All in all it cleaned up the absolutely atrocious default synaptic behavior into something that's somewhat liveable. Please try this if you have a synaptics touchpad and see if it cures your click woes.

If it does, please post that it does, and perhaps we can entice the troll under the linux synaptics bridge to change the defaults.

[nfsd (in4mer+launchpad)]

Oh, yeah, and I use zsh, and this is the definition for syn:

Feel free to adjust it for what you want. It's more a function to clean up the CLI behavior of the synaptics utility by being able to blow off all the mixed capitalization (POOR FORM, GUY) in the variable names, and search for names if you don't know the exact right thing. I got tired of typing | fgrep whatever.

syn () {
 local -a argArray
 local blob
 blob=$(synclient -l)
 [ -n "$1" ] || {
  echo $blob
  return
 }
 while [ $argv[1] ]
 do
  argArray[1]=$argv[1]
  argArray[2]=$argv[2]
  argv[1]=()
  if [ ! $argArray[2] ]
  then
   echo $blob | fgrep -i "$argArray[1]"
  else
   argv[1]=()
   argArray[1]=$(echo $blob | grep -iP "\s${argArray[1]}\s" \
                    | awk '{print $1}')
   [ $argArray[1] ] && synclient "$argArray[1]=$argArray[2]" || echo "couldn't find that setting"
  fi
 done
}

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for xserver-xorg-input-synaptics (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]

[Alexander Adam (7ql6)]

Actually I also had the impression that the touchpad responds somehow slow.
I use a ASUS Zenbook UX31A and found this bug report by accident.
While everything else is configurable via gui settings the "tap to click response" is just slow.

For me

synclient FastTaps=1 MaxDoubleTapTime=100

fixed the problem but I don't understand why it isn't the default. I know other people which use Ubuntu and sometimes tap a few times because the default settings just feel unresponsive.