To disable the touchpad on your Linux machine (Ubuntu used in the example), run xinput list
$ xinput list
⎡ Virtual core pointer id=2 [master pointer (3)]
⎜ ↳ Virtual core XTEST pointer id=4 [slave pointer (2)]
⎜ ↳ PixArt HP X500 USB Optical Mouse id=9 [slave pointer (2)]
⎜ ↳ SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad id=12 [slave pointer (2)]
⎣ Virtual core keyboard id=3 [master keyboard (2)]
Find the id of your touchpad and replace it in the following command to disable it. (In the example, my touchpad's ID is 12)
$ xinput set-prop 12 "Device Enabled" 0
To re-enable the device,
$ xinput set-prop 12 "Device Enabled" 1
But doing this often can be cumbersome, hence I have added the following in my ~/.bash_aliases
to have shortcuts for disabing and re-enabling the touchpad:
alias disable-touchpad='xinput set-prop `xinput list | grep -i touchpad | cut -f 2 | grep -oE '[[:digit:]]+'` "Device Enabled" 0'
alias enable-touchpad='xinput set-prop `xinput list | grep -i touchpad | cut -f 2 | grep -oE '[[:digit:]]+'` "Device Enabled" 1'
With this, you can disable and re-enable the touchpad using the disable-touchpad
and enable-touchpad
commands.
So, if you like it, feel free to add them to your ~/.bash_aliases as well. Good riddance from accidental clicking!
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