Monday, April 30, 2018

Re-enabling right click functionality for my Thinkpad touchpad

I have a Lenovo Thinkpad Yoga 11e running Debian Sid. The touchpad has a left and a right click area at the bottem. For some reason, the right click ability recently stopped working. I have not yet found the reason, but I was able to fix it by adding the emphasized lines in /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/70-synaptics.conf.


Section "InputClass"
        Identifier "Default clickpad buttons"
        MatchDriver "synaptics"
        Option "ClickPad" "true"
        Option "EmulateMidButtonTime" "0"
        Option "SoftButtonAreas" "50% 0 82% 0 0 0 0 0"
        Option "SecondarySoftButtonAreas" "58% 0 0 15% 42% 58% 0 15%"
EndSection
Edit

Nope. Stopped working again and both bottom areas act as left click. As it is working as a left click, I guess, the touchpad is physically ok. So I have no idea, what's going on :(

Edit 2

Thanks to Cole Robinson and the link he provided I found the reason and a fix. GNOME 3.28 uses the clickfinger behaviour by default now. By setting the click method from the 'fingers' (clickfinger) method back to 'areas', either using gsettings or gnome-tweaks, the right click ability is back after rebooting the system.

PS: With the new default clickfinger method, the right- and middle click are emulated using a two- and three-finger tap.