Middle click with a three finger touchpad tap on 11.10, How can I restore this?

Synaptic touchpads used to support a three finger tap for middle clicking in Ubuntu 10.10 (same as clicking the scroll wheel on a mouse.)

This critical functionality is broken in Ubuntu 11.10

How can I restore middle clicking on a touchpad?

Solution 1:

You could use a commandline programme called "synclient", which should be already on your system.

synclient Tapbutton3=2

where "Tapbutton3" means a Two-Finger Tap, and the 2 is for middle click.

This method only works until restart (or some other mousesettings-program overrides it). To get this functionality permanently, put this in /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/50-synaptics.conf before "EndSection"

Option "TapButton3" "2"

Solution 2:

Just found an amazing thing: Taping on the top right corner of the touchpad is like clicking the middle mouse button. I know it's not the same as the triple click and position accuracy is needed :( but it's the closest I could find to triple click.

BTW, clicking on the lower right corner is like clicking the the right mouse button.

Source: https://askubuntu.com/a/106444/13330

Solution 3:

The problem is with the ubuntu patches against xserver-xorg-input-synaptics package.

The solution to the problem is simple - just replace the ubuntu-provided package with one without those patches.

Here's how:

Download the appropriate Debian package from this site (choose your architecture, either i386 or amd64):

http://packages.debian.org/squeeze-backports/xserver-xorg-input-synaptics

Then remove the original package from your system and replace it with the one downloaded. Reboot the system and 3-finger tapping should be working again.