Clickpad - this way to madness

I ran into some trouble recently trying to improve my laptop’s touchpad behaviour under Mint 17.2. It became a bit of a shitshow that culminated with me nearly pulling my hair out and every tap of the clickpad (a.k.a. touchpad without physical buttons) giving me either a middle or right click depending on the time of day and barometric pressure outside.

Anyways, I managed to step back away from the edge and have it working quite well now. It involved tweaking the settings for the area at the lower section of the trackpad a little so that finger touches on the upper part of it along with the clicks on the lower part would play better together. At least that’s what I think it involved.

It’s working now… so I’m not fiddling with it anymore.

The only thing remaining is the suspect palm rejection of the Synaptics driver. There are many complaints out there and it sure isn’t as good as it could be. But again it’s working so I’m stepping back and letting it be.

Anyways, I thought I’d throw up my current /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/50-synaptics.conf file in case it helps anyone. Please don’t tell me that things in it are redundant or misplaced. It works.. and that’s good enough for me right now.

Incidentally, my laptop is a Dell Inspiron 7000 series 15.6” laptop with an i7-4510u - and I still prefer using a mouse.

# /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/50-synaptics.conf  (MagicMint) M0427
# Additional options may be added in the form of
#   Option "OptionName" "value"
# See man synaptics (4) for details

Section "InputClass"
 Identifier "touchpad ignore duplicates"
 # Ignore events from old driver
 MatchIsTouchpad "on"
 MatchOS "Linux"
 MatchDevicePath "/dev/input/mouse*"
 Option "Ignore" "on"
EndSection

Section "InputClass"
 Identifier "touchpad catchall"
 # Device
 Driver "synaptics"
 MatchIsTouchpad "on"
 MatchDevicePath "/dev/input/event*"

 # Palm detection
 Option "PalmDetect" "1"
 Option "PalmMinWidth" "4"
 Option "PalmMinZ" "40"

 # Dragging & tapping
 Option "LockedDrags" "on"
 Option "FastTaps" "on"
 Option "AccelFactor" "0.1028806" #2x
 Option "MinSpeed" "1"
 Option "MaxSpeed" "1.75"
EndSection

Section "InputClass"
 Identifier "Default clickpad buttons"
 # Lacking mouse buttons
 MatchDriver "synaptics"
 Option "LTCornerButton" "8"

 # Left-handed pad w/ middle button on the left side
 #Option "SoftButtonAreas" "1630 0 1737 0 0 1629 1737 0"

 # Right-handed pad w/ middle button on the right side
 #Option "SoftButtonAreas" "0 1629 1737 0 1630 0 1737 0"
EndSection

# Clickpad fix
Section "InputClass"
        Identifier "touchpad border config"
        MatchIsTouchpad "on"
        Driver "synaptics"
        Option "BottomEdge" "4416"
        Option "AreaBottomEdge" "4000"
    Option "VertTwoFingerScroll" "on"
EndSection

Section "InputClass"
 Identifier "Multi-finger taps"
 MatchDriver "synaptics"

 # The following worked in Nadia only via synclient
 Option "TapButton1" "1"
 Option "TapButton2" "2"
 Option "TapButton3" "3"
EndSection

# End of configuration file