HowTo Deactivate the Touchpad while Typing

When you work on a laptop, the touchpad can get pretty cumbersome while typing on that tiny keyboard. This is a way to automatically deactivate the touchpad while typing.

The touchpad should be enabled again with a 0.5 second delay. The program syndaemon is able to do this.
To make it work, the following steps are necessary:

Modify the Xorg Config

Look for the Section “InputDevice” that has the Identifier “Synaptics Touchpad” (or similar) and add the “SHMConfig” “on” line. It should then look similar to this: 

Section "InputDevice"
    Identifier "Synaptics Touchpad"
    Driver      "synaptics"
    Option      "SendCoreEvents" "true"
    Option      "Device" "/dev/psaux"
    Option      "Protocol" "auto-dev"
    Option      "HorizScrollDelta" "0"
    Option      "SHMConfig" "on"
EndSection
Please make a backup of your /etc/X11/xorg.conf, so you can restore it if something went wrong.

Then restart your Xserver with one of the following methods:

Now the program syndaemon is able to deactivate your touchpad, but the daemon needs to be run to make it work.

Run Syndaemon

To start syndaemon manually, you can use the line: 

syndaemon -i 0.5 -d
The value behind the -i option defines how many seconds until the touchpad will be activated again. I consider 0.5 seconds as a very comfortable value.


If you found the option that suites best you can add the mentioned command to the startup programs in the sessions manager (found at System → Preferences → Sessions).

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