Disable laptop touchpad on Wayland

Question

I need to disable the touchpad of my laptop. I am using Gnome on Wayland.

• libinput should provide this functionality, but apparently it doesn't.
• xinput doesn't work because I'm on Wayland.
• I think Gnome offered some switch to do so in the input settings, but it isn't there anymore (Gnome shell 3.34 — maybe this is an Xorg exclusive feature?).

Is it really asked too much if I want do disable an input device?

---

Edit: xinput is NOT a solution!

Its man page has a whole section on Wayland (emphasis mine):

XWAYLAND

Xwayland is an X server that uses a Wayland Compositor as backend. Xwayland acts as translation layer between the X protocol and the Wayland protocol but does not have direct access to the hardware. The X Input Extension devices created by Xwayland ("xwayland-pointer", "xwayland-keyboard", etc.) map to the Wayland protocol devices, not to physical devices. These X Input Extension devices are only visible to other X clients connected to the same Xwayland process. Changing properties on Xwayland devices only affects the behavior of those clients. For example, disabling an Xwayland device with xinput does not disable the device in Wayland-native applications. Other changes may not have any effect at all. In most instances, using xinput with an Xwayland device is indicative of a bug in a shell script and xinput will print a warning. Use the Wayland Compositor's native device configuration methods instead.

TL;DR: If I disable the touchpad using xinput, it will still continue working as before, but XWayland applications won't see the cursor move anymore.

Answer 1

First of all, try if this dconf setting is of any use:

gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.peripherals.touchpad disable-while-typing 'false'

It was stated with false while the name would imply true.

This setting should be for Xserver configurations:

gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.peripherals.touchpad send-events 'disabled'

Notebook also may disable the touchpad with Fn+F5; you may try that.

If that doesn't work, please add the output of libinput-list-devices to your question.  You also may want to have a look at the Touchpad Indicator GNOME Shell extension.

Answer 2

Other methods were not working for me on KDE Plasma, so I tried to disable the touchpad the naive way:

ydotool key 530:1 530:0

This command essentially sends KEY_TOUCHPAD_TOGGLE which request to switch touchpad on or off.

In order for this setup to work, the ydotoold daemon must be running in background (e.g. as a systemd service):

cat ~/.config/systemd/user/ydotoold.service
[Unit]
Description=Starts ydotoold service
StartLimitIntervalSec=0

[Service]
Type=simple
Restart=always
RestartSec=3
ExecStart=/opt/ydotool/ydotoold
ExecReload=/usr/bin/kill -HUP $MAINPID
KillMode=process
TimeoutSec=180

[Install]
WantedBy=default.target

Now it's possible to programmatically activate/deactivate touchpad, for example, in scrips or through KDE Connect.

Tested on ydotool version 1.0.4 from GitHub.

Answer 3

This may work with xinput even if you are using Wayland.

Install the xinput package if necessary. Then find out which is your device by typing

xinput list | grep -i touch

You may find a string like "SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad". Leave out the grep part if the list is empty to see whether you can find something else that sounds like touchpad.

Use this string (modify the next command as needed) and type

xinput set-prop "SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad" "Device Enabled" 0

You can re-enable the touchpad with a "1" instead of a "0" at the end.