[PATCH xf86-input-synaptics 00/12] Clickpad support

[Chase Douglas]

On 02/11/2012 12:45 PM, Bryce Harrington wrote:
> On Sat, Feb 11, 2012 at 04:32:10PM +0000, Daniel Stone wrote:
>>> What Bryce was saying is when you go from one touch on the touchpad to
>>> two, but before the button is pressed, the cursor freezes. As soon as
>>> the button is pressed, the cursor unfreezes so you can click and drag
>>> with two fingers. On irc, Bryce told me that he tends to leave one
>>> finger on the buttonpad, move the pointer with another, and press the
>>> button when he's got the cursor in the right location. That's not
>>> possible anymore because we inhibit pointer motion when more than one
>>> touch is on the touchpad.
>>
>> Right - separate but all related - we hit this too during our clickpad
>> work.  When the second finger lands, it could be for a scroll, for a
>> click, or for some other gesture.  So perhaps one approach could be to
>> not change state until we've definitively established what's going on
>> - so if you've got pointer motion on going and a second finger lands,
>> continue tracking the same finger for pointer motion until you've
>> worked out whether it's a scroll, or a click, or a pure touch gesture.
>>  We did this to some extent with the scroll stuff, to make sure we
>> were avoiding unwanted pointer motion when doing two-finger scrolling.
> 
> Yes, that would provide a smoother experience it sounds like.

The problem is that this still allows for moving the cursor while two
touches are on the touchpad, which means multitouch gestures will be
inhibited.

> Fwiw, here's a ppa with an ubuntu package of the patch I tested.
> https://launchpad.net/~bryce/+archive/clickpad-synaptics-ubuntu

You beat me to it :). I have a package at:

https://launchpad.net/~chasedouglas/+archive/clickpad

I have made some changes to the patches. Everything is up to date in my
fd.o repo, but I don't want to send the patchset again until I get some
testing feedback on ubuntu. I've spammed the list enough lately as it is :).

In particular, the changes:

* Disable clickpad click action by setting the default timeout to 0. The
timeout inhibits the left button being activated until it expires. I
think there will be people who would like clickpad click action, but
they will need to deal with that issue. I think disabling it is a better
default.

* Fix a few other small niggles that I can't remember off the top of my
head :).

-- Chase