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I thought that I had set syndaemon to disable the touchpad while I type, and for 0.8 seconds afterwards. In order to change the default touchpad delay of 2.0 seconds, which is hard-coded into the touchpad settings dialog, I unchecked "Disable touchpad while typing" and added "syndaemon -i 0.8 -K -R -t" to the list of startup applications. Most of the time now, the touchpad doesn't register taps while I type, as I want. However, sometimes while typing, the cursor still flicks to a random spot in the text box, even while I am in the middle of typing. I don't take anywhere near 0.8 seconds between keystrokes - what could be happening here?

To verify that syndaemon is running with the correct options when the unwanted behavior occurs, I run:

$ ps -ef | grep syndaemon
user      1840  1747  0 Sep23 ?        00:00:00 syndaemon -i 0.8 -K -R -t

Everything seems fine. What could the problem be? How do I go about finding out if syndaemon is to blame?

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  • Did you ever find a solution for this? I'm experiencing the same problem.
    – Computarch
    Dec 20, 2013 at 3:34
  • I never found a solution. It looks to me like a bug. I haven't updated to the newest version of Ubuntu yet, so it might have been fixed some time after 12.04.
    – apdnu
    Jan 15, 2014 at 19:26

3 Answers 3

1

-t Only disable tapping and scrolling, not mouse movements, in response to keyboard activity.

See man syndaemon for more info.

Basically, you've disabled tapping and scrolling, but not movement with that command. Try something like this instead:

syndaemon -i 0.8 -K -R
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  • 1
    I don't mind the movement of the pointer, which is why I use -t, but the moving of the keyboard input cursor (by tapping) is the problem.
    – apdnu
    Sep 24, 2012 at 20:52
  • What's "keyboard input cursor", and how many cursors are there? Sep 24, 2012 at 21:05
  • 1
    The cursor is the thing in the textbox that shows you where the characters will appear if you type. The pointer is the thing that you move with your mouse. I said "keyboard input cursor" the second time to try to get that across.
    – apdnu
    Sep 24, 2012 at 22:46
  • I see. Did you get the same behavior when the timeout was 2 seconds? Sep 24, 2012 at 23:15
  • 1
    Adjusting the timeout doesn't help. The timeout doesn't always hold. Often, while I am in the middle of typing a word, the cursor will jump to another point. The time between keystrokes in that case is on the order of 100-200ms, far shorter than any timeout I've ever set. For example, I was just typing '**kwargs' in a python script. The first '*' appeared in the correct position, but the second '*', typed almost immediately afterwards (I double-tapped the key quickly), appeared at a different location, as the cursor had switched positions in between keystrokes.
    – apdnu
    Nov 2, 2012 at 19:21
1

The only way I've found to make syndaemon work in its current incarnation is to disable the XRecord support (it doesn't seem to work at all), and use -m 50 (that is, poll every 50 milliseconds).

So:

syndaemon -m 50

However, this seems to make the keyboard lose keypresses and flip to "shift always down" modes and such instead, so essentially syndaemon seems to be useless. The only way to use a touchpad is to manually disable the touchpad with a keyboard shortcut.

1
  • The -m 50 solved my weird "Won't wake up again" problem. Cheers!
    – JayKuri
    Apr 2, 2016 at 21:51
0

I've been plagued with this problem for some time as well. I run in a terminal

while true; do synclient|grep TouchpadOff; sleep 0.5; done

Then type in a different window some keys. I noticed that it outputs TouchpaddOff=1 as soon as you type small letters, but capitals (Shift+letter) are NOT disabling keypad. Cursor and mouse always jump when using capital letters. I looked in the syndaemon source, and it seems the -k and -K options are the culprit. If you press Shift to use a capital, the touchpad can get re-enabled. It's a bug. But a workaround is to remove -k and -K

I use

syndaemon -i 0.8 -d -R

and everything works fine.

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  • 1
    Same as askubuntu.com/a/192579/158442?
    – muru
    Oct 17, 2017 at 9:09
  • no because the bug is in the implementation of the -k and -K and that is the bug which re-enables keypad unwanted while typing
    – Jeroen Ost
    Oct 19, 2017 at 11:16
  • This is the only answer that actually address the question "how to monitor syndaemon"
    – cmbarbu
    Oct 16, 2018 at 17:49

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