[SOLVED] Enable right-click touchpad with a tap

fox · 2016-05-15 13:07:11

My Synaptics touchpad has right and left-click buttons and the scrolling works OK, but what I would also like to work is the right-click function (contextual menu) with either a two-finger tap or a tap on the right side of the trackpad. I looked up an earlier posting on the forums and found that this has something to do with synclient. My parameter settings in synclient for the tapbutton 2 and 3 are both 0. Would one of these have to be changed to 1 to make this work or is there some other setting? How do I get this changed permanently?

Last edited by fox (2016-05-15 13:07:48)

hhh · 2016-05-15 13:38:56

The configuration is different for different touchpads. What is the output of...

grep "TouchPad: buttons:" /var/log/Xorg.0.log

It's somewhat explained here...
https://wiki.debian.org/SynapticsTouchp … ptics.conf

nobody · 2016-05-15 13:44:54

fox wrote:

My Synaptics touchpad has right and left-click buttons and the scrolling works OK, but what I would also like to work is the right-click function (contextual menu) with either a two-finger tap or a tap on the right side of the trackpad. I looked up an earlier posting on the forums and found that this has something to do with synclient. My parameter settings in synclient for the tapbutton 2 and 3 are both 0. Would one of these have to be changed to 1 to make this work or is there some other setting? How do I get this changed permanently?

You're right; you're interested in the following options:

Option "TapButton1" "integer"
    Which mouse button is reported on a non-corner one-finger tap. Set to 0 to disable. Property: "Synaptics Tap Action" 
Option "TapButton2" "integer"
    Which mouse button is reported on a non-corner two-finger tap. Set to 0 to disable. Property: "Synaptics Tap Action" 
Option "TapButton3" "integer"
    Which mouse button is reported on a non-corner three-finger tap. Set to 0 to disable. Property: "Synaptics Tap Action" 
Option "ClickFinger1" "integer"
    Which mouse button is reported when left-clicking with one finger. Set to 0 to disable. Property: "Synaptics Click Action" 
Option "ClickFinger2" "integer"
    Which mouse button is reported when left-clicking with two fingers. Set to 0 to disable. Property: "Synaptics Click Action" 
Option "ClickFinger3" "integer"
    Which mouse button is reported when left-clicking with three fingers. Set to 0 to disable. Property: "Synaptics Click Action"

so you can have different behaviour when clicking with two fingers or touching with two fingers. For example, I have set:

    ClickFinger2            = 3
    TapButton2              = 3

which means "report a right-click on double-finger touch and double-finger click".

This is most likely what you also want.

To make these changes permanent, you can add a synclient invocation to your autorun/startup scripts:

synclient ClickFinger2=3 TapButton2=3

or write a xorg.conf file to /etc/xorg.conf.d/synaptics. The man page has more information.

Head_on_a_Stick · 2016-05-15 15:14:58

twoion wrote:

To make these changes permanent, you can add a synclient invocation to your autorun/startup scripts:
synclient ClickFinger2=3 TapButton2=3

Just to note that BunsenLabs already has a `synclient` line present in ~/.config/openbox/autostart:
https://github.com/BunsenLabs/bunsen-co … ostart#L25

Simply add tapbutton2=3 to that line, immediately before 2>/dev/null

This configuration is per-user and (IMO) works better on a multi-user system than editing files in /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d, the latter method would apply the touchpad settings to all users.

fox · 2016-05-15 22:19:19

Awesome, Head-on-a-Stick. I don't know if I needed to capitalize TapButton, but I did and it worked once I logged back in. These forums are great for relative newbies like me!

hhh · 2016-05-15 23:06:05

Glad we could help, marking the subject [SOLVED].

Head_on_a_Stick · 2016-05-16 06:35:38

fox wrote:

I don't know if I needed to capitalize TapButton

No, the synclient(1) command is case-insensitive, the configuration file uses the capitalisation because it looks neater

#1 2016-05-15 13:07:11

[SOLVED] Enable right-click touchpad with a tap

#2 2016-05-15 13:38:56

Re: [SOLVED] Enable right-click touchpad with a tap

#3 2016-05-15 13:44:54

Re: [SOLVED] Enable right-click touchpad with a tap

#4 2016-05-15 15:14:58

Re: [SOLVED] Enable right-click touchpad with a tap

#5 2016-05-15 22:19:19

Re: [SOLVED] Enable right-click touchpad with a tap

#6 2016-05-15 23:06:05

Re: [SOLVED] Enable right-click touchpad with a tap

#7 2016-05-16 06:35:38

Re: [SOLVED] Enable right-click touchpad with a tap

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