Phantom mouse clicks in Ubuntu

I am encountering phantom mouse clicks on my Dell XPS 13 using Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. Basically, if I am touch typing a long sentence, I often end up with the end of the sentence being inserted in the beginning. It behaves as if someone clicked the touchpad, but that isn't the case since the touchpad has a very audible click.

Has anyone else encountered this issue? And how do you fix it?

thanks Akintayo

1 Answer

You have "Tap to click" enabled in "Settings" - "Devices" - "Mouse and Touchpad". This is actually quite sensitive and easily triggered even while typing.

Install "Gnome Tweaks" and on the "Keyboard & Mouse" tab, make sure "Disable while typing" is enabled for the touchpad. They may already greatly improve the situation. However, if you are using synaptics, there used to be an issue on Dell XPS machines where two touchpad drivers were present. synaptics would then interact with the driver that was not effectively used, making it impossible to turn on "disable touchpad while typing". Disabling the unneeded driver then made it work.

Better still might be to switch to the libinput driver if you are using synaptics. Using the libinput driver rather than the older synaptics driver greatly improves the experience. libinput is the default on newer Ubuntu versions. Ubuntu 16.04 may still use the synaptics driver. So using a more recent version of Ubuntu (Fresh install, no upgrade) may also improve thinks. Or, if you see you are currently using synaptics, you may try switching to the libinput. To check, install "Synaptic Package Manager" (Synaptic here is not related to synaptics driver) and see which of the packages xserver-xorg--input-synaptics or xserver-xorg--input-libinput is installed. If both are installed, remove synaptics, if only synaptics is installed, remove it and installlibinput. Reboot. This should force your system to uselibinput`. Still check on Gnome Tweaks to eventually enable "Disable while typing".

Finally, you could set up a hotkey allowing you to disable or enable "Tap to click" quickly. Following script will do the trick

#!/bin/bash
STATUS=$(gsettings get org.gnome.desktop.peripherals.touchpad tap-to-click)
case $STATUS in true ) gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.peripherals.touchpad tap-to-click false
# notify-send "Tap-to-click Off" ;; false ) gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.peripherals.touchpad tap-to-click true
# notify-send "Tap-to-click On" ;;
esac

Make it executable and assign it to a hotkey (I use Ctrl+Esc). However, recently discovering that installing Xubuntu (next to Ubuntu) made my laptop use synaptics, and then reverting to libinput (after removing Xubuntu desktop) removed that need for me.