Help to disable the multi-touch gestures in 14.04?

Question

Does anyone know how to disable the multi-touch gestures for the touch-pad, specifically the application switcher and Unity launcher?

I have a Asus C710 Chromebook with Ubuntu 14.04 installed natively. When I have more than two fingers on the touch-pad, which happens if i'm scrolling or editing, the application switcher and/or unity launcher take me away from the window i'm on. This has become an extreme annoyance, I have already disabled the application switcher in Compiz, but it still appears.

Charney Kaye · Answer 1 · 2015-07-30T16:14:06.757

6

From the terminal, run synclient to view all touch-pad properties.

Now, according to the official touch-pad support docs in order for multi-touch gestures to work, the touch-pad property ClickFinger3 must equal 0. So we will do the exact opposite:

synclient ClickFinger3=2

edited Jul 30 '15 at 16:14

answered Jul 30 '15 at 15:44

Charney Kaye

642

6

This seems to fix the incredibly annoying 3 finger tap. Any ideas how to disable the 4 finger 'Dash' menu? – MattK Sep 13 '15 at 14:28

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered May 09 '20 at 16:39

The solutions above did not work on my OS, Ubuntu 16.04, and I have a Dell Precision. TapButton3 and ClickFinger3 did not have any affect. I still had an annoying application switcher come up and change my application when I would accidentally touch thee fingers to the touchpad, which happened all the time. I really hated this feature and I finally figured out how to truly disable it.

What I noticed was that on the list of xinput devices was two touchpads. This will interfere with synclient settings, you cannot just change TapButton3 and ClickFinger3 when you have multiple touchpads, you need to use xinput.

For xinput this is the command you need!!

xinput list-props

⎡ Virtual core pointer                      id=2    [master pointer  (3)]
⎜   ↳ Virtual core XTEST pointer                id=4    [slave  pointer  (2)]
⎜   ↳ DLL07BF:01 06CB:7A13 Touchpad             id=12   [slave  pointer  (2)]
⎜   ↳ SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad                id=15   [slave  pointer  (2)]
⎣ Virtual core keyboard                     id=3    [master keyboard (2)]
    ↳ Virtual core XTEST keyboard               id=5    [slave  keyboard (3)]
    ↳ Power Button                              id=6    [slave  keyboard (3)]
    ↳ Video Bus                                 id=7    [slave  keyboard (3)]
    ↳ Video Bus                                 id=8    [slave  keyboard (3)]
    ↳ Power Button                              id=9    [slave  keyboard (3)]
    ↳ Sleep Button                              id=10   [slave  keyboard (3)]
    ↳ Integrated_Webcam_HD                      id=11   [slave  keyboard (3)]
    ↳ Intel HID events                          id=13   [slave  keyboard (3)]
    ↳ AT Translated Set 2 keyboard              id=14   [slave  keyboard (3)]
    ↳ Dell WMI hotkeys                          id=16   [slave  keyboard (3)]

Find your device from this list.

xinput set-prop <device ID>|<device name> <Synaptics Tap Action>|<number (on my machine this is 282)>  LAST VALUE 2

xinput set-prop <device ID>|<device name> <Synaptics Click Action>|<number (on my machine this is 283)> LAST VALUE 2

Those are usually lists of numbers set them like 1 3 2.

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered May 26 '14 at 20:31

There are a couple of programs I know of that you could try:

Unity-tweaks, sort of a standard catch-all for changing unity - it has an option for disabling two-finger scrolling

pointing devices: I think this installed by default, and tries to modify options for the synaptics touch pads

score 0 · Answer 4 · edited Apr 13 '17 at 12:24

0

According to How can I disable arbitrary default multitouch gestures in Unity? and this more recent example, the annoying 4 finger Dash shortcut is hardcoded into Unity. Thus recompiling Unity is required.

edited Apr 13 '17 at 12:24

Community

1

answered Feb 24 '17 at 15:03

qwr

2,802

Help to disable the multi-touch gestures in 14.04?

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