Synaptics touchpad switches apps in an undesirable way
Wendell Nichols
wcn00 at shaw.ca
Sun Jan 17 16:32:48 UTC 2010
Tim wrote:
> On Sat, 2010-01-16 at 10:22 -0700, Craig White wrote:
>
>> I've seen people tape a flap of cardboard over the touch pad if they
>> use a mouse.
>>
>
> That is so tempting... The simple solutions are often the best.
>
> I've tried reconfiguring mine, but that causes its own problems:
> Sometimes you need to use it, because you don't have the mouse, and you
> really don't want to have to reconfigure things, yet again. Disabling
> the pad while typing adds annoying delays to your editing if you
> actually do want to want to use the pad. Disabling tapping doesn't
> disable tapping 100% of the time on my system. I wish it did, I have
> real buttons on my laptop that don't accidentally trigger, but the pad
> does.
>
> Can we design something worse than the mouse?
> Yes, here's a slow-as-stuck-in-molasses twiddle stick in the middle of
> the keyboard, that's worse than steering the inertia-riddled ship in the
> Asteroids game.
> Can we design something worse than the stick?
> Yes, here's a touch pad. Sensitive to the movement of a fly, five feet
> away.
> I dread to think what comes next...
>
>
I solved the mouse stud problem by removing the little rubber knob on
top, and now it does not intrude on my life :)
I don't want to disable the touchpad, I need it because when sitting in
an armchair (where I work for many hours a day because I'm recovering
from back surgery) I just don't have a convenient place for a regular
mouse. I basically like the touchpad; I can scroll vertically and
horizontally and it automatically stops working when I type. The ONLY
big problem I have is that if I change applications by clicking on the
task bar; it scrolls through several apps or desktops as I move from the
taskbar to the desktop! It does this because the taskbar accidentally
pics up a command to scroll. I just need to get the taskbar to stop
interpreting the mouse scrolling input. You would thinnk that would be
a taskbar setting but there appear to be very few settings available for
it. Meybe there is an better taskbar widget... I'll look around.
Its such a small thing... and its so annoying that you would expect the
designer of the task switcher to have considered it... unless they've
never used a laptop!
Onwards and downwards...
wcn
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