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I have a Logitech T650 touchpad that I'm using with Ubuntu 16.04. It uses the Synaptics TouchPad driver. Works great except for one really annoying problem: when using the "two-finger flick" gesture in under to scroll up and down, if you flick too quickly this will be detected as a either a one-finger or a two-finger tap instead of a flick, and it will do a left-click or a right-click instead of scrolling.

You often use many flick gestures quickly to scroll through a web page so it's quite likely you'll end up unintentionally left- and right-clicking things on the way.

Some very interactive websites, e.g. Trello, have a lot of click targets in areas that are also scrollable and when clicked these targets move, modify and delete things. You have to be very careful when scrolling on these sites.

I know that accurate detection of taps vs scrolls is possible: I used to use an Apple Magic TrackPad on Ubuntu, I don't think it uses the Synaptics driver, I never had any of these false positives while scrolling with that.

I've been trying many Synaptics settings in synclient but can't find a configuration that reliably gets rid of false positive clicks while scrolling.

Does anyone know a solution?

Sean Hammond
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  • You can try libinput. It is a new user space touchpad driver. It can be installed by sudo apt install xserver-xorg-input-libinput. Tapping should be enabled manually in the config file. – Pilot6 Jul 04 '16 at 13:20
  • Thanks @Pilot6. Immediately discovered that "kinetic" or "inertia" scrolling doesn't seem to be supported (e.g. in Chrome) with libinput, whereas it was with synaptics. That's a shame because I really like inertia scrolling. But I'll give libinput a try for a while anyway, on initial testing it does seem to be much better than synaptics at not clicking while two-finger scrolling (seems to be perfect actually). And tap to click and two-finger-tap to right-click worked out of the box. Cheers! – Sean Hammond Jul 04 '16 at 15:05
  • @Pilot6 do you want to re-post your note as an answer, and I'll accept it? libinput completely eliminates my problem, and I think losing inertia scroll is a worthwhile tradeoff. If you don't want to I'll re-post your note as an answer myself! – Sean Hammond Jul 05 '16 at 10:30
  • I added an answer. Inertia scroll is not supported in libinput deliberately. There is an explanation at the maintainers site why. – Pilot6 Jul 05 '16 at 13:42

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You can install libinput instead of using xorg-synaptics.

It can be done by running

sudo apt install xserver-xorg-input-libinput

If you need to enable tapping, you can do it in the config file.

For more details see this question.

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