I now have an easy 220614-0020 Linux toggle touchpad binding. Still not optimal.

Touchpad-indicator

The Internet told me about atareao/Touchpad-Indicator: An indicator for the touchpad, which also does basic settings, including disable touchpad when typing.

First thing it did is change some settings with speed/acceleration/… on open, touchpad behaves differently now.

The disable-touchpad-when-typing doesn’t work for me, but other options work. Looking deeper, it changes these options in the synaptics driver, that I can view/edit throughsynclient.

synclient -l to list them.

The actual option itself seems to do this:

synclient PalmDetect=1

which doesn’t work for me either.

Python script

Someone wrote a python script to do the touchpad disabling: How can I disable touchpad while typing? On Ubuntu 16.04 syndaemon isn’t working - Ask Ubuntu, but does it have to come to this?

A solution online was to disable one-finger-taps as clicks, but in my qtile setup the focus follows the mouse, even without clicks.

But actually actually actually - that’s a setting I’m not too attached to!

Disable one-tap-click and don’t focus on mouse hover

The hopefully final solution:

1. synclient TapButton1=1
2. Added this to config.py: follow_mouse_focus = False

Unexpectedly, helped with a lot of random usability bits.