/dev/thoughtbin

How to make your Touchpad stop working

Yesterday, a very unpleasant thing struck me. My touchpad has started to work after I installed a batch of updates on my Arch Linux system. This proved particularly annoying because it now behaves in an extremely obnoxious fashion: the entire area of the touchpad gets mapped to the screen space, making it very hard to control in a proper way. Heck, you could call it "The devil of pointer devices" if my laptop didn't allow me to disable it using a hardware switch, which in turn is weird, because most other functionality provided by the F-keys had to be provided by my own scripts and bindings in my window manager (not my own - yet).

This situation calls for a fix - ladies and gentlemen, I present to you:

Disabling Breaking your touchpad completely

Well, not breaking. But making it dysfunctional would be a proper term.

The problem: I don't have a synaptics driver installed, so I don't know where I have to search for configuration files to disable this "feature" we are talking about.

Now, according to the arch wiki, the offending component in the absence of synaptics is evdev, which has a configuration file over at /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/10-evdev.conf. There are a few sections in that file, which follow a rather strange syntax (vim tells me that it's a special syntax called xf86conf. I also found out that we can comment stuff using #. Thanks, vim):

# Section "InputClass"
#         Identifier "evdev touchpad catchall"
#         MatchIsTouchpad "on"
#         MatchDevicePath "/dev/input/event*"
#         Driver "evdev"
# EndSection

So I commented out the section used to match on my touchpad. Let's hope this works as planned.

Be right back, restarting X.

after Restart: No, it does not. However, some sources suggest to modify the section like this:

Section "InputClass"
        Identifier "evdev touchpad catchall"
        MatchIsTouchpad "on"
        MatchDevicePath "/dev/input/event*"
        Option "Ignore" "on"
EndSection

And - oh wonder - it works. It works not. You know what I mean, right? That's it for now - useless article on trivial stuff over.

Update (January 2017)

Since Arch Linux seemingly replaced evdev with libinput in all cases, you need to adjust the instructions above for a config file with similar content and libinput in it's name. The syntax and semantics remain the same, however.