14.04 - Make synclient changes persistent

Question

No other related thread has a definite answer for this.

Some say to create 50-synaptics.conf in /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/ , while others say to use the one in usr/share/X11.

Creating etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/50-synaptics.conf broke my machine and forced me to boot into CLI to delete the folder.

Using the one in usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/ had no effect on synclient settings.

There are some other solutions which is basically to make a startup script, but I feel like that is not an optimal solution.

Does anyone have a working way to make synclient settings persistent using a conf file?

Answer 1

Just ran into this. The first option that you list is the one I went with. You need to make sure that you rename the file to a number greater than 50. In my case, I created the file /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/51-touchpad-config.conf. After restarting, I was able to confirm it worked with the synclient command. In my case, I wanted to persist changes to the HorizScrollDelta option, so my file looked as follows.

Section "InputClass"
        Identifier "desensitize horizontal scrolling so it doesn't trigger when vertically scrolling."
        MatchIsTouchpad "on"
        Option "HorizScrollDelta" "650"
EndSection