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Thomas A.
Asked: 2010-11-10 23:46:48 +0800 CST

How do I restore two finger middle click again?

  • 772

it used to be that tapping two fingers on the touchpad send a middle mouse click. Now it does a right click and three fingers now are the middle click. I really can't understand the change and think it is a bug or badly copied from Apple or something. The reasoning escapes me totally. I use middle click to open links in a new tab in the browser all day and I rarely use right click (and I have a right mouse button below the touchpad, doh) Tapping three fingers on my tiny EeePC touchpad is next to impossible so I want the old behavior. I found:

synclient TapButtons2=2
synclient TapButtons3=3

but that did not work on 10.10

Does anyone know how to restore sane behavior?

multi-touch touchpad synaptics

13 Answers

  1. The default settings that seem to be enabled with "tap to click" (on my laptop anyway) also provides the following functionality:

    • Middle Click (tap at top right of scroll area)
    • Right Click (tap at bottom right of scroll area)
    • 10

  2. You may also be interested in installing the gpointing-device-settings package, which will provide more configuration options for your touchpad. BTW, in Ubuntu 10.04LTS+ this replaces gsynaptics. 

    sudo apt-get install gpointing-device-settings

    Once installed you find it under System -> Preferences -> Pointing Devices.

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  3. The following solution has been tested on Ubuntu 12.04 and 12.10. It works perfectly.

    1. Create a file /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/touchpad.conf with the following content:

      Section "InputClass"
        Identifier      "Touchpad"                      # required
        MatchIsTouchpad "on"                           # required
        Driver          "synaptics"                     # required
        Option          "MinSpeed"              "0.5"
        Option          "MaxSpeed"              "1.0"
        Option          "AccelFactor"           "0.075"
        Option          "TapButton1"            "1"
        Option          "TapButton2"            "2"     # multitouch
        Option          "TapButton3"            "3"     # multitouch
        Option          "VertTwoFingerScroll"   "1"     # multitouch
        Option          "HorizTwoFingerScroll"  "1"     # multitouch
        Option          "VertEdgeScroll"        "1"
        Option          "CoastingSpeed"         "8"
        Option          "CornerCoasting"        "1"
        Option          "CircularScrolling"     "1"
        Option          "CircScrollTrigger"     "7"
        Option          "EdgeMotionUseAlways"   "1"
        Option          "LBCornerButton"        "8"     # browser "back" btn
        Option          "RBCornerButton"        "9"     # browser "forward" btn
EndSection

    2. Run dconf-editor from your user (don't sudo). Go to org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.mouse, uncheck active. (It is a known issue that Gnome's Settings Daemon may override your xorg.conf settings).

    3. Log out and log in. Things should be working fine now.

    • 7

  4. xinput gave:

    unable to find device SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad

    so I did 

    synclient TapButton3=3 TapButton2=2

    from a tip from http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1251372

    I put this in my ~/.bashrc and things seem to work

    • 3

  5. To fix the middle click you can use the following command:

    xinput set-int-prop NN 266 8 2 3 0 0 1 2 3

    Where NN is the id of the mousepad device, you can see it with the command xinput list. 266 is the id of the property "Synaptics Tap Action" you can see it with xinput list-props NN

    You have to run this command every time you boot/login/wake.

    To make it permanent you can put this command to the end of your .profile file in your home folder. (You can also try to put it in /etc/init.d/rc.local, but in my case it didn't work.)

    • 2

  6. To preserve your synaptics configuration after resume, I followed this steps from wiki.archlinux.org:

    Gnome settings daemon may override existing settings (for example ones set in xorg.conf.d) for which there is no equivalent in any of the graphical configuration utilities. It is possible to stop gnome from touching mouse settings at all:

    1. Run dconf-editor
2. Edit /org/gnome/settings-daemon/plugins/mouse/
3. Uncheck the active setting

    It will now respect your system's existing synaptics configuration.

    It worked on Ubuntu 11.10 AND now I have:

    • Two-finger scrolling.
    • Middle Click with two fingers tap.
    • Right Click (tap at bottom right of scroll area).
    • 2

  7. Try running this as a script

    xinput set-prop "SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad" "Synaptics Tap Action" 8, 9, 0, 0, 1, 2, 3  # pad corners rt rb lt lb tap fingers 1 2 3 (can't simulate more then 2 tap fingers AFAIK) - values: 0=disable 1=left 2=middle 3=right etc. (in FF 8=back 9=forward)
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  8. OK,

    I now have to run 

    xinput set-prop "ETPS/2 Elantech Touchpad" "Synaptics Tap Action" 8, 9, 0, 0, 1, 2, 3

    and

    gconftool-2 --set --type=bool /apps/gnome-power-manager/lock/suspend false

    to restore things to something I can tolerate, BUT I have to run those commands after each resume. Which script is run after each resume to automate that?

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  9. Add this to /etc/X11/xorg.conf:

    Section "InputClass"
    Identifier "middle button emulation class"
    MatchIsPointer "on"
    Option "Emulate3Buttons" "on"
EndSection

    WARNING: try with caution. When added to ~50-synaptics.conf in 11.10, may cause boot hang after login screen.

    • 1

  10. Solution #1

    I just discovered that if you keep two fingers pressed on touchpad and press the left click "button" of the touchpad it emulates the middle mouse button (so you need 3 fingers in total)

    Solution #2

    If you still want to click both buttons and produce a middle button emulation, execute:

    synclient EmulateMidButtonTime=100

    EmulateMidButtonTime allows you to change the time required to produce a middle button (allowed time period to click both buttons). 100 means 100 milliseconds (ms).

    You may set it to even higher values, such as synclient EmulateMidButtonTime=500 for 500ms, which is enough time to click both buttons

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