Disable Touchpad When Typing
I often accidentally touched the touchpad while typing, which led to the unintended activation of various UI elements.
I generally dislike touchpads; they feel like a useless invention, much like touchscreens in cars.
After some searching, I found a useful utility that monitors keyboard activity and disables the touchpad while typing:
syndaemon -i 1 -K -R -d -t -p /tmp/syndaemon.pid-i- specifies the wait time after typing stops-K- ignore modifier keys-R- uses the XRecord extension to avoid keyboard polling-d- daemon-t- disables tapping and scrolling only-p- creates a PID file
Since I use i3, I added the following to my i3 configuration:
exec sh -c '(umask 0077; pkill syndaemon; syndaemon -t -K -i 1 -d -R -p /tmp/syndaemon-${USER}.pid)'
The call to umask restricts access to the pidfile for other users. To
achieve this, I need to run sh -c with a shell snippet, as umask is a
built-in command that modifies the default mask for the shell.
Now, I no longer experience any touchpad issues.