My new HP Spectre laptop is good, but the touch pad is huge and the linux palm detection or turn off the trackpad when typing setting doesn’t work well. For a few months I had to type slowly and carefully in order to not send the mouse across the screen or worse, move the cursor in vim while trying to code.
Here’s the magic, xinput
In a shell use xinput –list to list out the devices providing input to the GUI. Find the overly sensitive trackpad’s number and then disable it with the command xinput disable 14
To make life even easier I’ve added the following aliases to my .login for easy toggling between a live or dead trackpad:
alias padon xinput enable `xinput --list | grep "Synaptics TouchPad" | sed -e 's/.*id=\([0-9]*\).*/\1/'` alias padoff xinput disable `xinput --list | grep "Synaptics TouchPad" | sed -e 's/.*id=\([0-9]*\).*/\1/'`
