415364 – Setting to disable when mouse is plugged in is missing when using Libinput driver
bugs.kde.org

I thought it would be great to spread awareness about this issue, hence I’m sharing it with you here.

In X11 there is a nice feature called “Turn off touchpad while mouse is plugged in” - it’s a lifesaver when you have a laptop with big touchpad; me and lots of people with this issue accidentally hit it all the time while typing.

Plasma X11 touchpad settings

However in Wayland this setting is missing. After some digging people found out that this is not an issue with the libinput driver itself (used for touchpads on Wayland), as it is supporting this feature for a while now; rather it’s an issue with the settings app itself, simply not implementing this feature while using Wayland.

Hope this will get attention from the community, as the recognition from the dev’s side is minimal.

  • @saturnonice
    4•9 months ago

    that is disappointing. was thinking about installing plasma next week. any workarounds? any other things that don’t work on a laptop?

    • @JokaJukkaOP
      2•9 months ago

      I do not know about any workarounds but you might have more luck searching for one.

      As for other issues, someone mentioned in the issue that the “Disable touchpad while typing” is broken on Wayland too; however both of these issues are not present on X11. Only other issue I’m having is kde daemon crashing while running pacman -Syu inside Konsole (see this link). Other than that, I was with Plasma more than happy and had no other issues.

      • @saturnonice
        2•9 months ago

        thanks will have a look. maybe there’s a workaround somewhere

        • @JokaJukkaOP
          1•9 months ago

          It should be filled in - check the provided link above.

    • @JokaJukkaOP
      4•9 months ago

      Unfortunately this simple trick does not work. It seems to be a backend issue too (not just missing button).

  • noncommutativegeometry
    1•9 months ago

    @JokaJukka though does this mean that you don’t disable the touchpad while typing at all? In the sense of, even when there is no external mouse attached the option you don’t disable the touchpad while typing. In case is it not annoying when you type even without an external mouse?
    Or how is it different in the two cases, I am a bit confused 🤔

  • @[email protected]
    1•9 months ago

    Have you filled a bug/feature request for this or found existing one to make sure someone can can address that? The feature seems obvoius fir you, but apparently it’s not so important for vast majority of users. For one I never used it and don’t feel like doing so.

    For now, you can work around it by binding a keyboard shortcut for touchpad toggling.

    • @JokaJukkaOP
      3•9 months ago

      Check the link I’ve provided above. It has been reported in December 2019.