Ubuntu – How to setup the touchpad multi-finger tapping functionality

mousemulti-touchsynapticstouchpad

I'm trying to setup my multi-finger tap in the following way:

  • Single finger – Left click
  • Two fingers – Middle click
  • Three fingers – Right click

What I currently have is:

  • Single finger – Left click
  • Two fingers – Right click
  • Three fingers – none

I've looked up several questions here on Ask Ubuntu, as well as the Ubuntu wiki on the subject (plus some general Google searching), but couldn't find anything to help me out. I know of xinput, but I don't know what to change there and how.

If anyone is able to point me to the right direction, I'd be grateful and award him with 25 shiny rep points, a large green tick mark, and some cookies.

Best Answer

This can be done using synclient.

To do this per-session (and to test that it's working correctly on your system), type into a terminal the following commands:

synclient "TapButton2"=2
synclient "TapButton3"=3

The option TapButtonx means "A tap with x fingers, not in a corner", while the numbers 1, 2 and 3 after correspond to left, middle and right click respectively.

To make these changes permanent, navigate to /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d. ls to find the file with "synaptics.conf" in the name (in my case, 50-synaptics.conf). Then, sudo gedit 50-synaptics.conf, and add the following lines into the end of the first InputClass section:

Option "TapButton2" "2"
Option "TapButton3" "3"

Then restart your machine, and you should be good to go.

If editing the 50-synaptics.conf file doesn't work, do the following: open dconf-editor and navigate to org/gnome/settings-daemon/plugins/mouse. Uncheck the box marked "active" and restart again. This will allow the synaptics settings to take precedence.

Related Question