I'm trying to make my 97 years old grandma's laptop (Ubuntu 20.04) more accessible for her. She is often frustrated because text that she has written vanishes. Disabling the touchpad and using an external mouse already helped a lot. But I suspect that she still accidentally selects text, when she tries to place the text cursor with her mouse (by dragging or double-clicking). When she continues typing the selected text is being overwritten. Because she needs to focus on the keyboard while typing she won't notice immediately what happened, making it difficult to "Undo".
- Would it be possible to disable this behavior so that selected text would be deselected instead of replaced, when typing?
- Is this a feature provided by the Linux system or is it implemented in each program? (Programs of interest are LibreOffice Writer and Mozilla Thunderbird)
- If changing the behavior is not possible, can I disable text selection via mouse in general?
Edit:
As suggested by @user-dz I created separate questions on how to address this issue in LibreOffice Writer and Thunderbird.
This question remains focused on how to solve this system-wide in Ubuntu 20.04.
xdotool search . behave %@ mouse-click getmouselocation