How to enable touchpad tapping in xfce4.

[edbarx]

If you have just installed XFCE you probably have noticed that tapping is disabled and that you are left with using the touchpad's buttons. This can easily be rectified by editing a system file as follows.

The system file is:
/usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/50-synaptics.conf

cd to it and open the text file with the name 50-synaptics.conf and place the following text in it. Some text is already there: you most probably only need to add two lines. The text is the following:

Code: Select all

Section "InputClass"
        Identifier "touchpad catchall"
        Driver "synaptics"
        MatchIsTouchpad "on"
        Option "TapButton1" "1"
        Option "RBCornerButton" "3"
EndSection

The last two lines before the "EndSection" do the trick. The first one enables tapping and the second one emulates a right button click when the touchpad's bottom-right corner is tapped. Allow some space if you also use your touchpad for scrolling.

Enjoy!

[dzz]

Thanks edbarx, that's really useful information.. and works fine on my Lenovo (tested only in squeeze so far)

Other info on touchpad tapping mostly mentions editing xorg.conf (clunky and it probably doesn't even exist)

What I have been using before was this (as normal user) or in a startup script, which also works:

Code: Select all

synclient TapButton1=1 LBCornerButton=2 RBCornerButton=3 MaxTapTime=140 SingleTapTimeout=140 MaxDoubleTapTime=140

Does anyone know how the 50-synaptics.conf edit might affect a system that has no touchpad? I would like to use it as a "live-image" hook (same image is used on different machines)

This might affect not only XFCE, I don't know as it's the only "mainstream" desktop used here.

[manishthatte]

Now the double tapping works but i lost scrolling functionality....

What do it do?

[manishthatte]

OK. I got it.

What I did was added the above lines plus downloaded a program gpointing-device-settings
and enabled the scrolling from it.

Now both works tapping and scrolling.

[mino]

this works for me

apt install xserver-xorg-input-synaptics

[debiman]

^ completely different problem.

The system file is:
/usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/50-synaptics.conf

isn't this file owned by the Xorg package?
shouldn't one use /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/50-synaptics.conf or some such instead?

[Head_on_a_Stick]

shouldn't one use /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/50-synaptics.conf or some such instead?

# DO NOT EDIT THIS FILE, your distribution will likely overwrite
# it when updating. Copy (and rename) this file into
# /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d first.

[4D696B65]

http://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=135630

[kevinthefixer]

I installed the Synaptics touchpad driver on my Dell laptop even though it does not have a Synaptics touchpad, because it adds a tab in XFCE4's "Mouse and Touchpad Settings" dialog that contains a "tap to click" tickbox. It enabled tapping even on my Elantek touchpad.

[andyprough]

I installed the Synaptics touchpad driver on my Dell laptop even though it does not have a Synaptics touchpad, because it adds a tab in XFCE4's "Mouse and Touchpad Settings" dialog that contains a "tap to click" tickbox. It enabled tapping even on my Elantek touchpad.

The same worked for me in Mate, and it added a Touchpad tab to the Mouse settings dialog that contains a "Enable mouse clicks with touchpad" tickbox. Using Elantech ETPS/2 touchpad.