Touchpad in laptops gets clicked all the time randomly when typing

[Naba Kumar]

The touchpad is supposed to be disabled when typing text, but isn't and texts get randomly selected, deleted, cursor moved, inserted elsewhere etc. due to spurious clicks the "proximity" of the hand causes on touchpad.

I do have "disable touchpad while typing" set to true in mouse settings ->touchpad. (btw, I am curious why this setting even present given I couldn't imagine anyone wanting to switch it off, even when gaming - I think I will file a separate bug).

This happens so often, like every few secs when typing, that it's super annoying to the point of not being able to use the laptop.

The only way out is to disable "Enable mouse click with touchpad" setting. Then, it's very hard to use touchpad on macbookpro because of the amount of physical clicks involved in middle of the touchpad making select-and-drag kind of operations almost impossible. Either way, it's unusable, so I recomment higher severity for this bug.

I am running 12.04, updated like yesterday, but I have seen this happen before in 12.04. So, I don't think this is due to last release. The macbook pro I have is, I think version 8,2. Please let me know if more info is needed from me. Thanks.

[Jussi Pakkanen (jpakkane)]

Upstream X already has a fix for the clickpad to make it work like it does on OSX. That is, you click with one finger and then move the other to drag-select. You can lift the dragging finger, move it to a better location and keep dragging. The click drag is only ended once you stop pressing the physical button on the trackpad.

[Naba Kumar (naba)]

Hi Jussi, thanks for mentioning that. It's good to know that; I was going to file a separate bug on that.

[Naba Kumar (naba)]

Hi Chase, I thought I have been using utouch on my macbookpro. What's the way to enable it?

[Naba Kumar (naba)]

I think I found the problem.

While figuring out what's happening with "Disable touch while typing" with syndaemon, I tried running it manually "syndaemon -i 3 -k -t -R" and it started working much better!

So, I looked at what the default command was for syndaemon from a fresh boot, and found it to be "syndaemon -i 0.5 -K -R". That specified disable duration to be 0.5 sec, which is waaay too small.

MacBook pro has this little disadvantage of having a huge trackpad, which means part of it on the right-side is partly touching the palm most of the time when touching - and any "relaxation" during typing will often trigger touch-clicks.

syndaemon's 2 sec default seems to be better tuned, *but* apparently this value was overridden with a hardcoded (nice!) value of 0.5 in gnome-settings-daemon, which launches this daemon. Hence, I can't change it just like that.

However, it looks like g-s-d realized the mistake and was changed to "2.0 sec" (still hardcoded, it would be much better to have it set as a dconf key): http://git.gnome.org/browse/gnome-settings-daemon/tree/plugins/mouse/gsd-mouse-manager.c#n528

The patch was done in 2010 http://git.gnome.org/browse/gnome-settings-daemon/commit/plugins/mouse/gsd-mouse-manager.c?id=3de30a7a14db5c3cdd88ead2e51a7f24cb071377;

But the question is why is it still 0.5 in my 12.10 presice installation. I have no idea and I am still trying to figure it out. The g-s-d version I have installed is 3.3.92, which seems to be fairly recent.

Note, increasing the timeout to 2 sec isn't going to solve it completely, but will reduce the instances to much lower number and hopefully much less annoying.

Will further comment once I figure out why it's stuck at 0.5 sec for me. If anyone running precise can do "ps aux | grep syndaemon" and let me know his value, I will be grateful.

[Naba Kumar (naba)]

eek! Ubuntu overrides it through a custom patch http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~ubuntu-desktop/gnome-settings-daemon/ubuntu/view/head:/debian/patches/10_smaller_syndaemon_timeout.patch. why :(? I would think pstream fixed it for a reason.

[Naba Kumar (naba)]

The bug is in gnome-settings-daemon. Moving there.

[Naba Kumar (naba)]

Apparently, the above patch was introduced as a response to bug #801763. The right way to have fixed that bug would have been to introduce -t option to syndaemon, rather than reducing the timeout. And I think it should be fixed in upstream g-s-d because I can understand that bug being sometimes annoying as well (but not as bad as this one).

I think I will file a bug upstream for that, but meantime, please restore the default 2s timeout by removing that patch in bug #801763 and perhaps introduce temporary patch for -t option until upstream settles it. Thank you all for you attention, and looking forward to the fix :).

[Naba Kumar (naba)]

Upstream bug to introduce -t option: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=673055

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Mikkel Kamstrup Erlandsen (kamstrup)]

"syndaemon -i 3 -k -t -R" has made my life so much better! Thanks Naba :-)

[Tim Peeters (tpeeters)]

I have the same problem on a Lenovo U300s.

$ ps aux | grep syndaemon
tim 1959 0.0 0.0 20168 952 ? S 15:44 0:00 syndaemon -i 0.5 -K -R

I just tried "syndaemon -i 3 -k -t -R" and it stopped the trackpad from doing anything.

[Tim Peeters (tpeeters)]

hmm. second attempt and

killall syndaemon && syndaemon -i 3 -k -t -R -d
seems to work :) but I'll test it a bit more. thanks!

[Naba Kumar (naba)]

gnome-bugs #673055 is not really fix for this bug (it's fix for bug #801763). The fix is to remove Ubuntu patch:

http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~ubuntu-desktop/gnome-settings-daemon/ubuntu/view/head:/debian/patches/10_smaller_syndaemon_timeout.patch

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Naba, that patch was added for a reason, the delay without it makes you feel like you pad is broken, like you type and reach the mouse and it doesn't react, it gets very frustrating

[Naba Kumar (naba)]

Hi Sebastien, I understand. Please read comment #14 in bug #801763 and also see the upstream bug I filed. Essentially, there is better way to deal with it.

[Pat McGowan (pat-mcgowan)]

I also experience the inadvertent touchpad click while typing - on a Samsung Series 9 with a Synaptics touchpad.
Running with the workaround seems to work
syndaemon -i 2 -k -t -R

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

@Naba: right, I just disagree with "The fix is to remove Ubuntu patch", the fix is to use that new -t option if it's confirmed to work without side effect

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

This bug was fixed in the package gnome-settings-daemon - 3.4.0-0ubuntu2

---------------
gnome-settings-daemon (3.4.0-0ubuntu2) precise; urgency=low

  * debian/patches/10_smaller_syndaemon_timeout.patch:
    - don't change delay, use -t option to block the clicks (lp: #962958)
  * debian/patches/61_unity_use_application_indicator.patch:
    - small tweaks to be consistant with other indicators,
      change the order and label from the two bottom items (lp: #964178)
  * debian/patches/bugzilla_segfault_dpms.patch:
    - upstream fix for a segfault (lp: #956824)

  [ Iain Lane ]
  * debian/patches/16_use_synchronous_notifications.patch: Fix invalid cast
    causing segfault when using keyboard backlight keys. (LP: #959874)
 -- Sebastien Bacher <email address hidden> Thu, 29 Mar 2012 21:43:49 +0200

[Naba Kumar (naba)]

Hi Sebastien,

I believe my comment #13 has been incorrectly interpreted. I wrote it in response to someone "assigning" this bug to gnome-bugs #673055 (I received a notification of the change). I wanted to make sure we don't end up interpreting the upstream bug as a fix for this one and hence wait on it (instead, pointed to the debian patch to be taken care).

I have been using this work around for sometime now and it really has reduced my stress level since :). For now while waiting for the official fix to land, I just did following to do away with manual launch.

1. renamed syndaemon to syndaemon-bin and
2. created a sh script "syndaemon" with following content
"
#!/bin/sh
syndaemon-bin -i 2 -t -K -R
"

Thanks.

[Naba Kumar (naba)]

Hi Sebastien, Just noticed the fix going in. Thank you very much!

[riverfr0zen (riverfr0zen)]

@19: Decent workaround.

That -t option really needs to be something the user can toggle through mouse settings, though, and not hardcoded.

I hate it when my cursor is flying around the screen as I type. Especially with the increasing amount of apps (and even websites) that seem to just beg for a hover to activate something or the other, it really is a pain (for me).