14.04 Touchpad is too sensitive

My touchpad is way too sensitive. While writing, the cursor jumps suddenly to the place the mouse cursor is sitting. I am not even touching the touchpad! I had the same problem with 12.04 and recently did an upgrade to 14.04, which didn't solve the problem.

In the mouse-and-touchpad settings, there are only settings for a mouse, not a touchpad. I have tried this:

sudo apt-get install gsynaptics

gpointing-device-settings

which didn't help.

Then I found this which might describe my problem.

But I get stuck halfway through. When putting this in the terminal:

(Add the patch to the psmouse module:)

sudo dkms add -m psmouse -v elantech-v6

I get this:

Error! Could not find module source directory. Directory: /usr/src/psmouse-elantech-v6 does not exist.

Can anyone help?

Solution 1:

xinput list

will give your device name (look for TouchPad)

xinput list-props "Touchpad Name"

This will give the available properties of your touchpad. You will probably find that the property is still "Synaptics ..." based, which means that you would type something like:

xinput set-prop "Touchpad Name" "Synaptics Finger" 50 90 255

I use the following properties (replace Touchpad Name with yours from the xinput list command) for mine to reduce the overall sensitivity:

xinput set-prop "Touchpad Name" "Synaptics Noise Cancellation" 20 20
xinput set-prop "Touchpad Name" "Synaptics Finger" 50 90 255

The above 2 commands seem to do the trick for me. Before them my touchpad was basically unusable.

Solution 2:

How about this manual which has a list of commands you can supposedly use. The arguments "50 90 225" as given in the other answers are explained in these docs to represent values for "low, high, and press." I don't know what my original values were, but ..."Synaptics Finger" 5 16 225 has made my system tolerable.

Solution 3:

I had a similar problem with Toshiba C-50 This solved my problem:

xinput list
xinput list-props "SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad" | grep -i finger
xinput set-prop "SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad" "Synaptics Finger" 50 90 255

Here, SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad is the name of your touchpad which get listed when you type in xinput list in terminal.Replace SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad by Your Device Name.

Source

Solution 4:

There is a command line tool called synclient. If you write man synclient in console it says:

This program lets you change your Synaptics TouchPad driver for XOrg/XFree86 server parameters while X is running.

There is also a GUI for the tool, called gpointing-device-settings, but it doesn't offer nearly as many options as the command line tool. The only caveat to using the command line tool is that there are so many options.

You can read this article by Jack Wallen for more details.

Solution 5:

The general solution to this problem is not to dial down the touchpad sensitivity, but to enable palm detection so that resting your palm while typing doesn't trigger a click. For example, I have libinput installed and put the following in /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/90-libinput.conf:

Section "InputClass"                                                                                                                        
        Identifier "libinput touchpad catchall"                                                                                             
        MatchIsTouchpad "on"                                                                                                                
        MatchDevicePath "/dev/input/event*"                                                                                                 
        Driver "libinput"                                                                                                                   
        Option "Tapping" "True"                                                                                                             
        Option "PalmDetection" "True"                                                                                                       
        Option "TappingDragLock" "True"                                                                                                     
EndSection                                                                                                                                  

For more information, check out these other relevant posts:

• Proper touchpad thumb & palm detection with libinput
• How do I disable the touchpad while typing?
• Touchpad issue: jumping cursor while typing (Ubuntu 14.04), syndaemon don't help