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My workstation with Ubuntu 12.04 is a MacBook Pro which supports a Multitouch Trackpad.

Unfortunately, I'm constantly accidentally triggering the three finger touch gesture to resize a window:

enter image description here

How can I disable this gesture?

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You should change the chosen answer to the correct one: askubuntu.com/a/198524/2230 – BigOmega Feb 21 '13 at 23:41
up vote 3 down vote accepted

Install Compiz config manager:

sudo apt-get install compizconfig-settings-manager

then run compiz config manager (ccsm in terminal) or simply type ccsm in dash.

and find at the bottom of plugins list:

Unity MT Grab Handles to disable it.

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1  
That's it! Thank you. – user24668 May 7 '12 at 20:37
3  
For me, this only removes the move-symbols (the transparent circles with arrows on gentmatt's screenshot above). The three finger touch gesture still moves/resizes the windows, but without showing those symbols. – Alfred Godoy Jun 3 '12 at 18:44
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I can confirm that this does not disable 3 finger gestures. I have MT Grab Handles disabled and I am still able to 3 finger drag windows around the screen. I would really like to disable this functionality. Any helpful contributions would be greatly appreciated. – oznah Jun 10 '12 at 3:11
    
This is not the "answer" at all. The question asked was how to disable multi-touch gestures. – doug65536 Dec 25 '15 at 21:33
up vote 3 down vote

The trackpad is configured by default to ignore three-finger taps (and three-finger clicks), and can be set it to regain control of it, thus overriding the window move association to three-finger taps. This is how it can be done:

  1. Look for the relevant property - open a terminal and type in:

    xinput

    Locate the line containing the trackpad details (e.g. ↳ CyPS/2 Cypress Trackpad id=12 [slave pointer (2)] ), and note its id value. Now type in:

    xinput list-props [id]

    where [id] is replaced by the id value (which is 12 in the given example). Now locate the Synaptics Tap Action property (e.g. Synaptics Tap Action (282): 2, 3, 0, 0, 1, 3, 0) and note its number, it will be enclosed inside round brackets (here it's 282). Also note the property values, we will use them later.

  2. Assuming you want this behavior at startup, create a shell script and add it to the startup programs. Let's call this script trackpad.sh. Our goal is to replace the last value with a new one, e.g. for middle click. Edit the script to contain the following: 

    #!/bin/bash

xinput set-prop [xinput-prop-id] [prop-number] [TR] [BR] [TL] [BL] [F1] [F2] 2

    Our concrete example command will than look like this (just for the sake of demonstration):

    xinput set-prop 12 282 2, 3, 0, 0, 1, 3, 2

    Notice that we replaced only the last value from 0 to 2, to signify middle click. You can choose any between 1 (left click), 2 (middle click), or 3 (right click).

  3. Grant the script with execution permissions, and run it. You're good to go!

Reference

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up vote 21 down vote

I have solved this issue by setting the following configuration values (initial values were 0):

synclient ClickFinger3=2
synclient TapButton3=2
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That did the trick. I found a couple more helpful links. I made changes in my xorg.conf and things are good now. askubuntu or arch – oznah Oct 10 '12 at 18:46
1  
why isn't there a UI for synclient? srsly (ubuntu 12.10) – NullVoxPopuli Dec 12 '12 at 16:14
    
@TheLindyHop nobody has written one yet, get on it! – BigOmega Feb 21 '13 at 23:41
1  
These reenable the middle-click-paste. Suggest value that is "ridiculous" like 12 or more for both parameters to disable the tripple-tap completely – ddotsenko Apr 21 '14 at 4:37
    
I used 15 for each of the values and it worked great on 14.04. – mrm Mar 3 '15 at 16:38

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