Ubuntu – How to tune touchpad for smaller area

laptoptouchpad

I just purchased the Asus Zenbook UX31A and I require some advice regarding tuning the touchpad.

Basically my problem is that the mouse buttons are withing the touch area and I would like it to be disabled. Such that only part of the touch area is recognized. I have attached an image to clarify the idea. Basically only the red area in the image should be recognized.

touchpad tweak

I have two reasons for this request: Firstly, I like to hold my thumb on the mouse button instead of holding it in the air. This is problematic, because touchpad thinks that I'm trying some kind of two finger gesture all the time and cursor stops moving.

Clicking is also problematic since every finger movement — regardless of how insignificant it might be — on the "button" will move the cursor.

I have been playing with some synclient settings like AreaBottomEdge etc. They have some effect but then I cannot highlight text or right button stops working.

How could I solve this?

Best Answer

It is very simple to accomplish this:

First discover the width and height of your touchpad typing in the terminal:

less /var/log/Xorg.0.log | grep -i range

In my case the output was this:

[    24.188] (--) synaptics: SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad: x-axis range 1472 - 5772
[    24.188] (--) synaptics: SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad: y-axis range 1408 - 5086

So the width is 5772 and the height is 5086. Now you can have a notion of the bottom area to disable, just try out values to get the desired area disabled. The command in the terminal is:

synclient AreaBottomEdge=**VALUE**(in my case 730)

That is all.