Setting up the touchpad

.. never used it because didn’t find it pleasant to use because no scrolling and clicking as I’m used to, but I can fix this! Google told me I should install synaptics stuff and use synclient to config it, but..

(21:30:13/11094)~/$ synclient
Couldn't find synaptics properties. No synaptics driver loaded?

Google led me here: x11 - synclient does not find synaptics properties despite Synaptics Touchpad in xinput list - Unix & Linux Stack Exchange

So in fact the “problem” is that touchpads is nowadays handled by libinput, not by synaptics. This is why xinput still lists the device, but synclient cannot find it.

The touchpad properties can also be controlled using xinput, via xinput list-props and xinput set-prop

Which works! xinput set-prop $device $propID $value, where the property id is given in parentheses in xinput list-props output: libinput Tapping Drag Enabled Default (330): 1

So I (in case gets reset after restart):

xinput set-prop 15 327 1 #enabled tapping
xinput set-prop 15 312 0 1 0 # scroll through side of touchpad

Interestingly, xinput set-prop 15 312 1 1 0 didn’t work, apparently I have to choose one. (Same for “click methods”)

Now we pray the xorg/synaptics drivers I installed at the beginning don’t mess up everything after restart ^^ I followed this: How to Activate Two-Finger Scrolling in Ubuntu 18.04 LTS

More advanced settings for libinput

The ArchWiki is excellent as usual. TIL a tap with three fingers is a shortcut for “paste” and you can change/remap that as everything else! Wow.

TODO - play with buttons and three-taps and two-taps and the physical buttons. Also, where does it define that button N is “paste”? And which clipboard are we talking about?

And - I can do it with my usb mouse!