Synaptic touchpad on Manjaro

2024-10-062024-10-06 Randy Usegnu

The Synaptic touchpad on Manjaro will stop responding and/or get glitchy after using it for about 10 minutes. You either have to press the F7 (toggle touchpad) key, so for a temporary fix I made a bash script to run xdotool to disable/enable the touchpad, then added it to a cron job to run every 5 minutes.

Start with setting a keyboard shortcut to enable/disable the touchpad

Make the bash script with the below in it, then make it executable with +x, and save it to /$USER/.local/bin

#!/bin/bash
sleep 0.5 && xdotool key 'ctrl+alt+m'
#sleep 0.01 && xdotool key 'alt'
#sleep 0.01 && xdotool key 'm'

sleep 0.05 && xdotool key 'ctrl+alt+m'
#sleep 0.01 && xdotool key 'alt'
#sleep 0.01 && xdotool key 'm'

Now make a cron task to run the bash script every 5 minutes