Touchpad-Indicator Now Automatically Disables The Touchpad When You Plug In A Mouse

Touchpad Indicator was created with a very simple feature in mind: to allow you to easily enable / disable your laptop or netbook touchpad with a click but it slowly started gaining some other cool features. About two months ago, Touchpad Indicator got a nice feature that allows you to toggle the Touchpad on/off using a keyboard shortcut which is very useful for those that have issues with the Fn keys.

Today, Touchpad Indicator got yet another very interesting feature: it can automatically disable the touchpad when you plug in a mouse.

To use this new feature, you'll have to configure it first: click the Touchpad Indicator and select "Preferences", then click the "Configure" button - at this point you should see a window like this:

You have to unplug your mouse (if connected) and click "OK". Then, another window will pop-up:

Plug in your mouse and click OK. Once you do this, the configuration should be over (make sure the "Disable touchpad when mouse plugged" option is enabled!).

Install Touchpad Indicator in Ubuntu

Important: if you've previously installed Touchpad Indicator (or any other app from the Atreao PPAs), you need to add the PPA below as that is now the official PPA for all Atreao apps, including TouchPad Indicator, Picapy, My Weather Indicator and so on.

To add the Atareao PPA and install TouchPad Indicator, use the following commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:atareao/atareao
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install touchpad-indicator

In case you find any bugs, please report them to the Touchpad Indicator page @ Launchpad. You can also help translate Touchpad Indicator into your language.

Want more appindicators? Browse our appindicator tag.

Thanks to the TouchPad Indicator developer Lorenzo Carbonell @ atareao.es for the news!

Touchpad Indicator Update Brings Keyboard Shortcut To Toggle The Touchpad On/Off

If your laptop or netbook doesn't already have a key  to toggle the touchpad on/off (or it doesn't work - as it seems there are issues with the Fn keys on some devices), you'll be glad to know that Touchpad Indicator now has an option to set a hotkey for quickly enabling / disabling the touchpad.

To set it, simply click the Touchpad Indicator, select Shortcut > Set Shortcut and then enter a letter (it will be used with Ctrl + ALT - you can't change those).

To install Touchpad Indicator in Ubuntu 10.10, use the following commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:lorenzo-carbonell/atareao
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install touchpad-indicator

Once installed, you'll find it under Applications > Accessories > Touchpad Indicator.

If you don't want to install Touchpad indicator, you can also do this with a script -> see the second part of this post: Ubuntu: Automatically Disable TouchPad While Typing

Touchpad Indicator Lets You Quickly Enable / Disable The Touchpad

Touchpad Indicator is a very simple indicator created by Lorenzo Carbonell (the Picapy developer), which as the name suggests, is designed to allow you to easily enable / disable your laptop or netbook touchpad.

To install Touchpad Indicator in Ubuntu (10.10 Maverick Meerkat only), you'll have to use the same PPA for Picapy:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:lorenzo-carbonell/atareao
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install touchpad-indicator

Once installed, you'll find it under Applications > Accessories > Touchpad Indicator.

See also: automatically disable the touchpad when you start typing (includes a script to enable/disable the touchpad using a hotkey for those with no built-in hotkey for this).

Thanks once again to Lorenzo Carbonell!

Ubuntu: Automatically Disable TouchPad While Typing

syndaemon is a program that monitors keyboard activity and disables the touchpad when the keyboard is being used. If you are using Ubuntu / Debian, syndaemon should already be installed and all you have to do is type this in a terminal to start it as a daemon:

syndaemon -d

To set the time you want syndaemon to restore your keyboard, run this command:

syndaemon -i 4 -d

Where "4" is the time between the period you stopped typing and when the touchpad becomes active.

Please note that I have noticed you need to kill syndaemon before changing it's settings. So before specifying an option, kill it with:

killall syndaemon

You can also specify syndaemon to only deactivate scrolling and tapping but leave your mouse pointer active even if you type on your keyboard, by ysing the "-t" option.

To see everything syndaemon can do, use the man command:

man syndaemon

The following example invokes syndaemon for 4 seconds after any keyboard activity (-i 4), except when modifier keys such as Alt or Shift are used (-K), and only disables tapping and scrolling (-t) for this period:

syndaemon -i 4 -d -t -K

And a bonus. A bash script to toggle the touchpad on an off with a hotkey:

# toggle synaptic touchpad on/off

# get current state
SYNSTATE=$(synclient -l | grep TouchpadOff | awk '{ print $3 }')

# change to other state
if [ $SYNSTATE = 0 ]; then
synclient touchpadoff=1
elif [ $SYNSTATE = 1 ]; then
synclient touchpadoff=0
else
echo "Couldn't get touchpad status from synclient"
exit 1
fi
exit 0

Save it in a file and call it whatever you want (for instance "toggle_touchpad.sh"), make the script executable (chmod +x toggle_touchpad.sh) and assign a hotkey for it (for instance by using CompizConfig Settings Manager, on the Commands options).

Note: If you use an EeePC, you can toggle the TouchPad on and off with an utility called EeePC Tray or with Eee Control (see step 9)