GNOME in Mouse settings -> Touchpad tab has a very useful option to disable
the touchpad while typing. Despite this being very useful, and since Ubuntu
Natty 11.04 less energy hungry*, it may still be annoying since the touchpad
may feel not enough responsive in a fast paced work environment. Luckily
syndaemon (which is the program providing us with this
feature) developers have already tackled this issue by creating option -t. This
enables the cursor to move while typing on the keyboard and before the -i
milliseconds grace time have expired, however it prevents the touchpad from
scrolling or clicking during this time. By enabling this feature you'll find
your workflow much more seamless and could easily reach lightning fast the
button you're looking for while the grace period expires. In order to have this
feature you have to disable the GNOME built feature (untick the
feature) and add to
/etc/rc.local
the following line above "exit 0"
syndaemon -i 0.8 -t -k -R
You may of course tweak the seconds of grace time -i N.n as you wish! After
reboot you may check if your tweak has been effective by typing
ps aux |grep syndaemon
if you see the above command executed well done! Another way to implement this
tweak at a per user level is adding a new row at Gnome's Startup applet running
this command at every login
syndaemon -i 0.8 -t -k -R
* now with the -R option it does not pool the keyboard any more every -i
milliseconds, thus leaving the CPU in idle state for longer.