What is a clickpad?
A clickpad is a touchpad that has no separate visible mouse buttons. However - it does have one leftclick mouse button - but this is situated underneath the touchpad surface and you can generate a left click by pressing firmly anywhere on the touchpad surface.
Another way to look at this is that a clickpad is like a giant leftclick button that has a sensitive touchpad surface overlaid on it.
There is a problem with this setup - the "hinge" of the mousebutton is at the top of the touchpad. This means that the bottom edge swings freely and clicks up and down without too much effort - but the closer you get to the top of the touchpad the harder it is to press the left click button.
The end effect is that your finger tends to move the cursor at the same time you try to press the left click. Weird stuff happens.
Number77 has a thread about this issue here
The behaviour of the clickpad can be changed by altering the settings of the synaptics touchpad driver. This used to be easy by using the flsynclient utility, however in modern hardware flsynclient does not let you adjust all of the settings of the synaptics driver.
You can however use the terminal to alter "synclient" settings directly.
I would like to offer some utilities and scripts to change clickpad behaviour.
At the moment these scripts are developed on an Acer Travelmate B113 so other clickpads may need some finetuning of the concepts.
Please note: not every user wants the same behaviour from a clickpad or touchpad so please look for settings that match your needs.
Firstly - it is handy to make a backup of the current synclient settings before making any changes. You can use my utility here to make backups or to restore the original settings (from a backup) - or to load any previous backup that gave you desired behaviours.
I will add more explanatory info here later, but for now I will post some handy scripts that make a clickpad more useable and stable.
The first script I will offer is one that will restore the 3 usual click functions that a mouse would give you ie: not just the leftclick that a clickpad has when you press firmly - but a leftclick, middleclick and also a rightclick.
(The script senses the size of your clickpad before defining button areas so should be useable on a variety of machines with different clickpads)
After running this script these clickable mouse buttons will be available along the bottom edge of the touchpad. Press firmly and listen for the button click under the touchpad.
(Tap-to-click is not affected by this script. It is still activated in addition to the three clickable buttons just added along the bottom edge)
Although users with a normal touchpad will have no trouble seeing where their buttons are - the clickpad button areas are not visible and not normally defined as a default anyway so I will also post images showing where to click for each function after this script has been run and these areas get activated:
EDIT :
V0.06 uploaded
- fixed problem with RightButtonTopArea calculation incorrect on larger touchpads
V0.05 uploaded
- fixed problem with having to run script twice.
v0.04
- script needed to be run twice on some machines to get MiddleButtonAreaLeft to stick.
NOTE : The .gz suffix on the attached script is a false suffix to allow the forum to post it. After you download the file please remove the .gz suffix (and then make the script executable)
Adjusting the modern Clickpad
Adjusting the modern Clickpad
- Attachments
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- B113_synclient_3MouseButtons_v0.06.gz
- Please remove fake .gz suffix, place in /root and make executable.
You may wish to use the backup utility first! See backup utility link within text description above. - (2.99 KiB) Downloaded 98 times
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- Leftclick_area.jpg
- (4.32 KiB) Downloaded 254 times
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- Middleclick_area.jpg
- (4.36 KiB) Downloaded 254 times
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- Rightclick_area.jpg
- (4.04 KiB) Downloaded 255 times
Last edited by greengeek on Fri 11 Jan 2019, 17:22, edited 12 times in total.
Have you seen this thread here:number77 wrote: I have been banned from my wifes acer after one or two scares with her installation of win10.
I am hoping to get a spare hdd to proceed with seperate xenialpup64 but as its a 8mm hdd I dont have a spare
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewto ... 608#943608 ?
Limbomusic made a webpage where he explains a method for setting up a usb stick to allow a uefi boot without modifying any internal drives.
I tried it with the B113 I am using and it works perfectly (except it is win8.1 not win10 so maybe irrelevant...)
I found his webpage method pretty straightforward and clear, although I did think he could make a couple of tiny improvements which I suggested here:
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewto ... 42#1011242
Uploaded new version of the 3MouseButtons script.
Previous version did not stick MiddleButtonAreaLeft if the script tried to define it prior to defining MiddleButtonAreaRight. (It would cause left click area to be incorrectly defined).
Seems reliable now - at least on B113. More testing on other clickpads to follow
Previous version did not stick MiddleButtonAreaLeft if the script tried to define it prior to defining MiddleButtonAreaRight. (It would cause left click area to be incorrectly defined).
Seems reliable now - at least on B113. More testing on other clickpads to follow