disable_touchpad_on_typing_linux

Disables the touchpad and touchpad buttons during typing.

Aren't there already working solutions for that?

Not in my case. The Gnome setting was not even available no me in the GUI. Changes in some config files didn't work.
There is an application called "touchpad-indicator", which was triggered with a huge delay and also didn't disable the touchpad buttons.
This was causing me lots of headaches. BUT NO MORE!

This code is minimal, optimized and should work on any Xorg or Wayland supported Linux distribution.

Building

Xorg

gcc xorg_touchpad.c -o disable_touchpad_while_typing

With optimization:
gcc xorg_touchpad.c -O3 -o disable_touchpad_while_typing

Wayland

gcc wayland_touchpad.c $(pkg-config --libs --cflags glib-2.0) -o disable_touchpad_while_typing

You need the package libglib2.0-dev. Install it with sudo apt-get install libglib2.0-dev

Usage

By using the standard parameters and autodetection of your keyboard and touchpad, use
./disable_touchpad_while_typing

There are 3 additional flags:

• -e: ID of the keystroke event file which can be found in /dev/input/. By not providing this argument, the program tries to find the ID automatically. However, if it doesn't succeed, then you have to provide it by yourself with this flag.
  E.g. -e 12
• -h: Helper message
• -t: Timeout: Timeout in milliseconds between the last keystroke and re-enabling the touchpad. Default value is 1000. E.g. -t 1000

Start application after booting

Place the block-touchpad.desktop file into /home/<user>/.config/autostart and adapt the directory in this file to the one pointing to the binary file. This directory only exists if you're using Gnome as your desktop environment.

Memory Leaks

Valgrind shows no memory leaks:

valgrind -s --leak-check=full --show-leak-kinds=all ./disable_touchpad_while_typing_xorg

==17595== HEAP SUMMARY:
==17595==     in use at exit: 0 bytes in 0 blocks
==17595==   total heap usage: 16 allocs, 16 frees, 15,315 bytes allocated
==17595== 
==17595== All heap blocks were freed -- no leaks are possible
==17595== 
==17595== ERROR SUMMARY: 0 errors from 0 contexts (suppressed: 0 from 0)

------------------------------------------------
valgrind -s --leak-check=full --show-leak-kinds=all ./disable_touchpad_while_typing_wayland

==8297== HEAP SUMMARY:
==8297==     in use at exit: 0 bytes in 0 blocks
==8297==   total heap usage: 10 allocs, 10 frees, 34,260 bytes allocated
==8297== 
==8297== All heap blocks were freed -- no leaks are possible
==8297== 
==8297== ERROR SUMMARY: 0 errors from 0 contexts (suppressed: 0 from 0)