Touching touchpad pastes random things typed earlier

thatoneshadykid · 2011-07-23 19:08:30

I'll be typing, whether in LibreOffice or in Firefox and my hand will accidentally hit the touchpad and randomly paste some string of text I'd typed earlier. Anyone who knows this feature, please tell me how to disable it.

julian516 · 2011-07-23 19:14:36

Touchpads can drive us to distraction while typing. On my machine I can simply turn it off with an Fn-F1 combination. I have no trouble with my Logitech nano wireless mouse. I suspect there is also a cli command that will turn off the touchpad but I do not know what it is. I have several friends who simply cover their touchpads with a heavy cardboard (e.g., cut out of backside of legal pad).

Atragor · 2011-07-23 19:29:48

Some touchpads (e.g. Synaptics) have multitouch feature and can be configured to emulate a click of middle mouse button by touching them with two or three fingers. Probably your touchpad is configured in that way, so your touch is recognized as middle click which pastes the contents of selection buffer. If you are using Synaptics, this behaviour can be changed by the set of "ClickFinger*" options.

Last edited by Atragor (2011-07-23 19:30:36)

Dheart · 2011-07-23 21:16:59

Tapping with 2 fingers on the touchpad will emulate a middle click, which in linux is used for paste.

ulit · 2011-07-25 12:00:32

In my system synaptics touchpad options (ie. aforementioned emulating middle button) is configured in /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/10-synaptics.conf (in your case it can be a similar file). By the way: middle button pastes text which was previously highlited, not the one which was copied by ctrl + c.

Last edited by ulit (2011-07-25 12:01:00)

thatoneshadykid · 2011-07-25 19:36:20

I don't much care for these handy-dandy little features people like so much; I want my touchpad to be just that, a touchpad. I don't like touchpads anyway, so trying to use it and having it do everything from scroll back through browser history to pasting random text in the middle of what I'm typing to trying to bathe my feet for me is considerably less than appealing.

I have the 10-synaptics.conf file, so how do I edit it? By the way, I'm a n00b to the inner workings of UNIX.

karol · 2011-07-25 19:46:19

"Pasting random text" with the middle mouse button is a pretty standard feature of *nix / Linux :-)

You edit the file with your text editor. It's just a guess, but commenting out

        Option "TapButton3" "3"

might do the trick.

You don't like your browser scrolling through browser history and instead want to scroll through pages - https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Sy … pad_events

Last edited by karol (2011-07-25 19:52:34)

ANOKNUSA · 2011-07-25 20:16:05

Yeah, I've been there before... Remove references in 10-synaptics.conf to TapButton3--and TapButton2, if you wish--and you'll only have left-button tap-to-click emulation. You can look at the synaptics manual and the output of "synclient" in a terminal to help you tweak your settings.

Arch Linux

#1 2011-07-23 19:08:30

Touching touchpad pastes random things typed earlier

#2 2011-07-23 19:14:36

Re: Touching touchpad pastes random things typed earlier

#3 2011-07-23 19:29:48

Re: Touching touchpad pastes random things typed earlier

#4 2011-07-23 21:16:59

Re: Touching touchpad pastes random things typed earlier

#5 2011-07-25 12:00:32

Re: Touching touchpad pastes random things typed earlier

#6 2011-07-25 19:36:20

Re: Touching touchpad pastes random things typed earlier

#7 2011-07-25 19:46:19

Re: Touching touchpad pastes random things typed earlier

#8 2011-07-25 20:16:05

Re: Touching touchpad pastes random things typed earlier

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