How to enable touchpad?

Solution 1:

I accidentally disabled my touchpad. This is the way I found to re-enable it.

Press the "Windows key" to open the start menu. Type "terminal" and enter, to open the command line.

Then type:

xinput list

Find the 'id' of your touchpad. For me it looks like this:

Virtual core pointer                        id=2    [master pointer  (3)]
⎜   ↳ Virtual core XTEST pointer                id=4    [slave  pointer  (2)]
⎜   ↳ TPPS/2 IBM TrackPoint                     id=12   [slave  pointer  (2)]
⎜   ↳ SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad                id=11   [slave  pointer  (2)]

My touchpad has id = 11.

Then type

xinput set-prop 11 "Device Enabled" 1

(but replace 11 with whatever id your touchpad had)

Solution 2:

This work for me on kali linux:

gsettings reset org.gnome.desktop.peripherals.touchpad send-events

The schemas dir can be found by:

gsettings list-schemas

Edit: This works on Ubuntu 18.04 as well.

Solution 3:

Running Ubuntu 16.04 there is a painfully simple way to re-enable the touchpad if you disabled it via the "Mouse & Touchpad GUI":

• ALT+TAB to select the "Mouse & Touchpad GUI" if you currently do not have it focused. (Or use the Windows key -> Search for "Mouse and touchpad" -> ENTER)
• Use TAB to iterate through the items within the GUI until the ON/OFF slider is highlighted.
• Hit ENTER to toggle the switch back to "ON".

I realize this is very simple, but it took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out.