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.

3 comments:

  1. This might be why it stopped working: http://who-t.blogspot.com/2018/04/gnome-328-uses-clickfinger-behaviour-by.html

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    Replies
    1. Thanks Cole. That was it. After changing the method and rebooting the system I got my right cick back.

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    2. Thank you. This has likely fixed my problem too, which was the opposite of Daniel's: I prefer the clickfinger behaviour, and set it by hand using xinput, but it gets reset from time to time by something I had yet to identify. I'm using GNOME 3.22 and had not specified (to GNOME) a preference. But I suspect now it was GNOME that was periodically resetting my choice. I've now set GNOME to clickfinger too, and we'll see if I continue to have my problem.

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