Synaptics: enable mouse movement while AreaBottomEdge is being 'touched'

[Peter Hutterer]

On Sat, Mar 22, 2014 at 12:11:21AM +0100, Bastiaan Jacques wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I'm trying to enable mouse movement on my synaptics touchpad while
> touching the part of the touchpad 'masked' by AreaBottomEdge. My
> touchpad has 'integrated' mouse buttons, which makes clicking on
> something that isn't huge exceedingly difficult. So, I have disabled use
> of the region of the touchpad intended for these buttons by setting
> 
>   synclient AreaBottomEdge=4000
> 
> This works, for the most part. The issue is that I like to have one
> finger of the left hand touching, but not pressing, the left mouse
> button, while a finger on the right hand finger is moving the mouse
> pointer. This doesn't work, however: when anything touches the mousepad
> on the part masked out by AreaBottomEdge (or anywhere else), the
> touchpad stops registering mouse motion.
> 
> A notable exception is that when I click a touchpad button, *and* start
> mouse motion at the exact same time. Then I am able to move the mouse
> pointer with one hand, while the other is holding the mouse button. This
> isn't very useful in itself, but it shows that what I am after is, I
> suspect, a software matter.
> 
> Do you know whether there is anything I can do to make this happen?
> 
> If it helps, Xorg.0.log shows the device as:
> 
>   synaptics: SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad: Vendor 0x2 Product 0x7
> 
> I'm using the following synaptics driver package:
> 
>   xorg-x11-drv-synaptics-1.7.4-1.fc20.x86_64

I really recommend trying the current driver from git. We've had a bunch of
fixes to improve behaviour for clickpads and you may find that it works
better now, even without needing the AreaBottomEdge.

Cheers,
   Peter