Can you disable PART of a touchpad?
Solution 1:
From the synaptics driver man page:
The perceived physical edges may be adjusted with the AreaLeftEdge, AreaRightEdge, AreaTopEdge, and AreaBottomEdge options. If these values are set to something other than the physical edges, input in the space between the area edge and the respective physical edge is ignored. Note that this reduces the available space on the touchpad.
And that's exactly what we want, right? Therefore, we are going to have to come up with a value for AreaBottomEdge
, get the other three using xinput
, and write a custom xorg.conf
.
First of all, we need to find some information about our touchpad. In a terminal, run xinput list
. For me, the output looks like this:
$ xinput list
⎡ Virtual core pointer id=2 [master pointer (3)]
⎜ ↳ Virtual core XTEST pointer id=4 [slave pointer (2)]
⎜ ↳ PIXART USB OPTICAL MOUSE id=11 [slave pointer (2)]
⎜ ↳ ETPS/2 Elantech Touchpad id=14 [slave pointer (2)]
⎣ Virtual core keyboard id=3 [master keyboard (2)]
↳ Virtual core XTEST keyboard id=5 [slave keyboard (3)]
↳ Power Button id=6 [slave keyboard (3)]
↳ Video Bus id=7 [slave keyboard (3)]
↳ Video Bus id=8 [slave keyboard (3)]
↳ Power Button id=9 [slave keyboard (3)]
↳ Sleep Button id=10 [slave keyboard (3)]
↳ Chicony USB 2.0 Camera id=12 [slave keyboard (3)]
↳ AT Translated Set 2 keyboard id=13 [slave keyboard (3)]
My touchpad is identified as ETPS/2 Elantech Touchpad
. Now we need to find out some information for creating the xorg.conf
later. Let's figure out what values the driver is currently using for the touchpad edges by running:
xinput list-props "ETPS/2 Elantech Touchpad"|grep Edges
which, for me, outputs:
Synaptics Edges (280): 97, 2339, 56, 988
Save these values for later.
Now, create a new file named /etc/X11/xorg.conf
if it doesn't already exist, open it using your favorite text editor as root, and put this in it, using the values we found earlier:
Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "touchpad"
Driver "synaptics"
Option "AreaLeftEdge" "97" # the first value from "Synaptics Edges"
Option "AreaRightEdge" "2339" # the second value
Option "AreaTopEdge" "56" # the third value
Option "AreaBottomEdge" "988" # the fourth value - change this
EndSection
Remember that, for best results when creating this file, you must use the values that you found yourself. Do not use mine. (I'm not calling you an idiot or anything; I'm just making sure so that you don't screw this up.)
Also, you are going to have to change the value for AreaBottomEdge
so that it is less than the original and meets your requirements. You are going to have to experiment with this until you are satisfied with the results.
Also remember to log out and log back in after saving the file for the changes to take effect.
Solution 2:
If your laptop using Syntaptics touchpad you can do this with synclient
command.
For example, to shrink touch area on the right:
$ synclient -l | grep RightEdge
RightEdge = 1168
AreaRightEdge = 0
$ synclient AreaRightEdge=900
The RightEdge
shows physical eight edge coordinate. You could not change that, but you can override it using AreaRightEdge
.