Most modern laptops come with a touchpad for cursor control. It is typically located below the space-bar, which means it’s easy to rest your palms on it while typing and send the cursor flying. There are two ways to get around the problem: Disable it altogether and use another pointing device, like the red “TrackPoint” or an external mouse; or temporarily turn it off while typing. Here’s how to do both.

First, make sure the these packages are installed:

apt-get install usbutils xinput xserver-xorg-input-synaptics

Permanently disable

Any input device can be configured through the xinput tool. However, as machine configurations will be different, we’ll need to look at what is connected first. This will list internal and connected devices:

xinput list

The first command will list connected USB devices, which might be relevant. The second command will output a list like the following, where each device has an ID, but which will change based on the machine and what is connected. The example below is from a Lenovo Thinkpad with an external mouse, so three hardware pointing devices are listed: The touchpad; the trackpoint; and the external Logitech mouse. Notice the ID for the touchpad, which is 12 here.

⎜   ↳ SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad              	id=12	[slave  pointer  (2)]
⎜   ↳ Logitech M570                           	id=9	[slave  pointer  (2)]
    ↳ Integrated Camera                       	id=10	[slave  keyboard (3)]
    ↳ AT Translated Set 2 keyboard            	id=11	[slave  keyboard (3)]
    ↳ ThinkPad Extra Buttons                  	id=14	[slave  keyboard (3)]

We can query details about a specific device:

xinput list-props 12
xinput list-props 12 | grep Enabled

There are two ways to enable and disable a device: By setting the “Device Enabled” property, or with the xinput command shortcut which does the same:

xinput set-prop 12 "Device Enabled" 0
xinput disable 12
xinput set-prop 12 "Device Enabled" 1
xinput enable 12

Temporarily turn off while typing

You might want to use the touchpad though, and only avoid the “fat fingers” problem while typing. Here the syndaemon tool comes to the rescue. It’s a “a program that monitors keyboard activity and disables the touchpad when the keyboard is being used”. It means, you’ll have to make sure it’s running in the background, typically through the start-scripts of your desktop.

There’s a few settings to play around with and also a CLI client “synclient“. See also the synaptics driver documentation for more options.

Having this in a startup script will cover most common use cases:

/usr/bin/syndaemon -i 1 -t -d