[PATCH synaptics] Prevent button mashing on clickpads

Daniel Colascione dancol at dancol.org
Thu Oct 31 07:39:58 CET 2013


On 10/30/2013 11:39 PM, Peter Hutterer wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 29, 2013 at 05:08:25PM -0700, Daniel Colascione wrote:
>> On 10/29/2013 05:04 PM, Peter Hutterer wrote:
>>> On Sun, Oct 27, 2013 at 04:24:47PM -0700, Daniel Colascione wrote:
>>>> The tiny patch below disables the clickpad hardware "button" when
>>>> syndaemon has asked us to disable tapping.  Without this patch, I
>>>> frequently find myself accidentally clicking while typing.
>>>
>>> isn't this a physical button? if so, it'd be better to just disable the
>>> touchpad fully instead of just disabling tapping.
>>
>> It's a physical button, but it's unlike other physical buttons in
>> that it takes up the _entire trackpad_. It's a lot easier to trigger
>> this button than it is to trigger a traditional button, so it really
>> should be treated as a tap for disablement purposes.
>
> what device is this? if anything it takes me more effort on my clickpad to
> press the whole thing than pressing a button on the old-style clickpad.

It's a Lenovo X1 Carbon. All I can do is comment on my annoyance 
relative to my hardware.

>> The idea behind using TOUCHPAD_TAP_OFF instead of TOUCHPAD_OFF is to
>> allow the user to move the cursor as soon as possible after typing.
>
> I have no idea what the idea behind it is, the git history isn't forthcoming
> here.

It's the only reasonable explanation I can think of.

my suspicion is that tapping is a separate entity because accidentally
> causing a tap/scroll is a problem, moving a bit usually not (especially when
> palm detection sucks)

Yes.

>> By the time the user gets around to actually clicking something, the
>> type-inhibit delay will have expired and we'll have turned off
>> TOUCHPAD_TAP_OFF. This way, the user never notices the delay ---
>> users will take a few hundred ms to click anyway. If we used
>> TOUCHPAD_OFF instead, you'd either have to shorten the delay or
>> cause users more annoyance.
>
> synaptics history teaches me that you don't get to pick between less or more
> annoyance, you only get to choose who you're going to annoy...

So you're arguing that all options are equally annoyance, so we 
shouldn't change anything?


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