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[Stanley Sokolow <stanley@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

This is still a problem in Ubuntu 10.04 LTS.   There is a setting in
menu System > Preferences > Mouse > Touchpad that claims to disable
touchpad clicks while typing.   However, this is implemented in gnome-
settings-daemon poorly.   In that daemon, in function
set_disable_w_typing, the settings manager spawns syndaemon with a
parameter "-i 0.5", meaning to set the delay after a keypress to one-
half second (500 ms).  During that delay after a keypress, the touchpad
is temporarily ignored.   If you read the man page for syndaemon, you'll
see that the default delay interval is 2 seconds.   500ms is too short.
In effect, whether or not the user checks the setting in preferences,
the touchpad is not ignored while typing.   I've had to temporarily
disable the touchpad completely when I'm doing a lot of typing to avoid
accidental chaos when the heel of a hand brushes against the touchpad
during typing.

To work around this too-short delay, I killed syndaemon and re-spawned
it from the terminal with a 2 second delay "-i 2" parameter.   This so
far seems to be working fine, as intended.     So the right fix would be
to change line #511 in the gnome-settings-manager
http://git.gnome.org/browse/gnome-settings-daemon/tree/plugins/mouse
/gsd-mouse-manager.c?id=46cfbb45bac09fd86f13a1995a4b4b2742b39c25#n498 .
The parameter "0.5" should be "2" or you could remove the -i parameter
and it's argument completely, allowing the default built into syndaemon
to take effect.   Even better, add a slider in the mouse preferences
touchpad tab to let the user choose the delay that works best for
him/her.

Meanwhile, I'm going to try adding some shell script commands in my rc.local file to kill syndaemon and run it in daemon mode with a better interval.  This is what I tried in the terminal:
kill `ps -C syndaemon -o pid=`
syndaemon -d -i 2 -k

I'm not sure why the -k parameter is important, but it's in the gnome-
settings-daemon code already, so I'll just put it in my script, too.
The kill command fetches the process id number using the ps command,
then kills that process.   Then the syndaemon command re-spawns.   I'm
going to try this until an update to gnome-settings-daemon fixes this
bug.

Please, someone, be sure that the maintainer for gnome-settings-manager
gets a copy of this comment.

-- 
Touchpad should block while typing
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/27541
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