How do I disable the touchpad while I'm typing?

Question

I'm looking to disable the touchpad in Crunchbang 11 (Waldorf) while I am typing. The processes I've found online do not work for me.

All guides I have found (this thread, for instance) indicate to toggle a flag in /etc/hal/fdi/policy/, but the entire /etc/hal folder does not exist on my computer. Since Crunchbang uses Openbox, I found this guide; however, this option does not exist within my version of Openbox.

find | grep shmconfig.fdi (the file typically modified in these guides) returns no lines; that file does not exist on my computer. That is to be expected, though; the guides state that the file may not exist.

How do I disable the touchpad while I'm typing?

Solution

The syndaemon should do the job. It can be found in the package xserver-xorg-input-synaptic. From the man page

syndaemon - a program that monitors keyboard activity and disables the touchpad when the keyboard is being used.

Disabling the touchpad while typing avoids unwanted movements of the pointer that could lead to giving focus to the wrong window.

Example:

syndaemon -i 1 -t -d

This deactivates tapping after one second. There is also synclient with more options to set up the touchpad.

Comments

[Adrian Keister]

Does this command survive a reboot?