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I previously used synclient to increase the left click area to my entire touchpad as described in this answer, but according to this answer Ubuntu now ships with libinput instead of synaptics.

$ synclient -l
Couldn't find synaptics properties. No synaptics driver loaded?

How can I make it so I can left-click anywhere on my touchpad in Ubuntu 17.10?

If this is not possible, can I at least disable middle and right clicks on the touchpad? Right now I keep inadvertently middle clicking which closes tabs if I'm in my browser or pastes my cut buffer if I'm in a text editor, both of which are huge annoyances.

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  • Is there any reasons you don't (want to) have libinput ?
    – N. Cornet
    Jan 19, 2018 at 16:30
  • libinput is fine. I want to know how to achieve this with libinput.
    – Imran
    Jan 19, 2018 at 17:34

1 Answer 1

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I don't know how to do exactly what you're asking, but what I ended up doing is (trying to) disable the middle button on my trackpad entirely: Disabling middle mouse button

I just made a script which runs xinput set-button-map $id 1 0 3 where $id is an id displayed by xinput list for the trackpad devices. The three numbers assign button identifiers for the left, middle and right physical buttons. (So you could disable right button by changing 3 to 0, reverse them with 3 2 1, etc.) I have yet to find any instructions on doing this in a config file somewhere. Ideally this would be in the Mouse control panel for Ubuntu or at the very least in gnome-tweak-tool or something.

Oddly this disables middle clicking in firefox (the chief annoyance -- closing tabs and opening links in new tabs by accident) but still pastes in terminals. So not sure yet if this really works or if terminal and other applications are using some other event to interpret as paste. I will probably also go vote on any Firefox feature requests to add configuration options to disable tab closing and other middle-click actions.

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