When I mechanically click the touchpad, nothing happens. I figured out tap-to-click is working, and two finger taps are treated as right-click. Yet when I actually press down to click, it never registers as a click (no matter which part of the touchpad I click). I am not sure why - tap to click works, and the mouse moves around fine. I’m not certain on the next steps to solve this, I have mostly been looking into various touchpad configurations, e.g. Arch documentation on libinput
I just installed Ubuntu 21.10, partially because the wifi adapter is supported out of the box.
It seems like libinput is being used rather than synaptics (xserver-xorg-input-synaptics), based on this:
$ sudo dpkg -l | grep libinput
ii libinput-bin 1.18.1-1 amd64 input device management and event handling library - udev quirks
ii libinput10:amd64 1.18.1-1 amd64 input device management and event handling library - shared library
ii xserver-xorg-input-libinput 1.1.0-1 amd64 X.Org X server -- libinput input driver
Would love to see what ideas people have - I am not sure where to start as far as debugging past these steps … Has anyone else had this issue?
EDIT: So, I just found this: Trackpad clicks not registering? - #4 by Paul_Kim
It looks like clicking the middle of the trackpad many times gets it to work. It worked for me, too - I spammed the middle of the touchpad and less than a minute of that did get left and right clicking to suddenly work.
@satcomjimmy ah yes, I had to change the settings to get double finger for right click instead of the default where the area in which you clicked determined left or right click.
Here is how I changed that setting on Ubuntu 21.10:
gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.peripherals.touchpad click-method 'fingers'
To see what the options are, use this command:
gsettings range org.gnome.desktop.peripherals.touchpad click-method
Maybe I already changed something and it afected that, but it is just working for me today. I had previously added accessibility settings to allow a long press to act as a right click but it isn’t as clean and doesn’t work in every instance.
I faced this issue now. The touchpad’s clicks were not recognized.
I am using the things below.
Fedora 36
Kernal: 6.0.15-200.fc36.x86_64
Sway (Wayland based)
The clicks are recognized after clicking the middle of the trackpad many times.
One more criteria I found is, that I am using wireless mouse via USB-A expansion card in the left front port. When turning on the wireless mouse, and clicking by the mouse, the touchpad’s clicks were also started to be recognized after that.
Here is the latest log in the dmesg. I am not sure it is related to the issue.
dmesg
[50974.844446] usb usb2-port2: attempt power cycle
[50978.892272] usb usb2-port2: Cannot enable. Maybe the USB cable is bad?
This issue still annoys me. But I finally found a workaround not to use the touchpad click. That’s to emulate the mouse left, right click, and left drag & drop.
Below is my sway config file for that. And the entire sway config is here. The ydotool is helpful. On my keyboard, CapsLock is also Escape.
~/.config/sway/config
# Mod4: Meta key.
set $mod Mod4
...
# Mouse emulation
mode "mouse" {
# Left click (down then up)
bindsym Space exec "sudo ydotool click 0xC0"
# Enable the space key to drag & drop.
# However, the `bindsym --release` option is unreliable.
# https://github.com/swaywm/sway/issues/7217
# Left down (drag and drop start)
# bindsym Space exec "sudo ydotool click 0x40"
# Left up (drag and drop end)
# bindsym --release Space exec "sudo ydotool click 0x80"
# Left down (drag and drop start)
bindsym f exec "sudo ydotool click 0x40"
# Left up (drag and drop end)
bindsym d exec "sudo ydotool click 0x80"
# Right click (down then up)
bindsym s exec "sudo ydotool click 0xC1"
bindsym a exec "sudo ydotool click 0xC1"
# Return to default mode
bindsym Escape mode "default"
}
bindsym $mod+d mode "mouse"
...
As another workaround, I enabled the tap-to-click and tap-to-drag feature for the touchpad in libinput to sway (wayland-based-window manager) and i3 (X window-based window manager).
The setting is like this. You can see my actual config files here.
Thank you!