How to quickly enable/disable touchpad in Xubuntu 14.04 without installing other applications?
That can be easily done with these two commands (inspired by a different answer):
Disable:
synclient TouchpadOff=1
Enable:
synclient TouchpadOff=0
My initial answer was to use
xinput set-prop 15 "Device Enabled" 0
and
xinput set-prop 15 "Device Enabled" 1
where the id number may be other than 15: it can be be found by running
xinput list
I found about these commands in this answer under a question on how to disable the touchpad.
The commands can be added into launchers.
I prefer creating .desktop
files (in usr/share/applications
or in .local/share/applications
) for the two commands to be run easily with a launcher like Whisker Menu, Synapse, etc
Also:
by adding them into a single launcher,
setting advanced properties like in the image below
(namely 'show last used item' and 'inside button'),
- and adding two specific icons,
the launcher will always display the current status of the touchpad.
Also it is never a bad idea to assign shortcuts (Settings Manager - Keyboard - Application Shortcuts) to the two commands.
You also can use synclient, like in this answer.
To turn off touchpad:
synclient TouchpadOff=1
To turn on:
synclient TouchpadOff=0
I think this is more convenient way. You don't need to know device id.
So my solution is to create bash script ~/toggle-touchpad.sh:
#!/bin/bash
if synclient | grep --quiet 'TouchpadOff = 0'; then
synclient TouchpadOff=1
notify-send Touchpad Disabled
else
synclient TouchpadOff=0
notify-send Touchpad Enabled
fi
Modify file permission:
sudo chmod +x ./toggle-touchpad.sh
Next goto Settings-Keyboard-Application Shortcuts and add new shortcut. Enter path to the script (/home/your_username/toggle-touchpad.sh - for example). Specify shortcut (Fn+F9 in my case).
Done. Now you can toggle touchpad and you will get notification.
The non-launcher version:
#!/bin/bash
# toggle state of synaptics touchpad
tpid=`xinput list | grep SynPS | sed 's/.*id\=\([0-9]\+\).*/\1/g'`
declare -i status
status=`xinput list-props ${tpid} | grep Device\ Enabled | sed -e 's/.*\:[ \t]\+//g'`
if [ 0 -eq ${status} ] ; then
xinput enable ${tpid}
else
xinput disable ${tpid}
fi