Re: How to get rid of horrible GUI functionality

[Bob Proulx]

tomas@tuxteam.de wrote:
> Davin Pearson wrote:
> > My new computer is a laptop and from time to time my fingers brush
> > against the mouse sensor pad, causing the following window to
> > appear:
> >...
> > I want to kill such pop up windows as it annoys me when I am
> > trying to use GNU Emacs to do useful work.
>...
> Apart from other's suggestions, which seem fine, if you are using a
> touchpad driven by the Synaptics driver (which seems to be pretty
> common these days), there's `synclient' which allows, among other things to
> switch on/off a synaptics touchpad.

Along these same lines I use the 'syndaemon' to turn off the touchpad
when I don't need it.  This is a halfway config that doesn't
completely disable the touchpad but doesn't completely allow it to be
on all of the time and annoy me either.  Because I also drag my palm
across the touchpad and zinging the touchpad annoying.  When typing it
will disable the touchpad but when not typing the touchpad can be used
normally.

  syndaemon -i 2 -K -p $HOME/var/run/syndaemon.pid -d
    -i 2 is the default 2 second idle before enabling touchpad
    -K ignore shift, alt, control, combinations
    -p create a pid file
    -d run as a daemon

My full config that I share between multiple devices and software
distributions is the following.  First it determines if I have the
syndaemon installed and does nothing if it is not there.  Then it
launches the daemon with a 20 second idle delay before enabling it.
(20 seconds because I often pause a while to think.)  I also instruct
it to keep a pid file in my home.  But because it doesn't leave the
pid file with the proper permissions I immediately chmod it as I
desire so that it isn't world writable.

  which syndaemon >/dev/null \
    && syndaemon -i 20 -K -p $HOME/var/run/syndaemon.pid -d \
    && chmod go-w $HOME/var/run/syndaemon.pid

Since I am very old-school I put this in a very old-school config file
that I won't mention because it is unlikely you are doing that way.
But if you put that in your .xsessionrc file I believe that is most
likely the best place for it for most people.

Bob