Increase pointer speed for trackpad in Ubuntu 12.04

Question

I am trying make Apple Trackpad more usable for my needs. So did set the

motion-acceleration to 120 and

motion-threshold to -500

as suggested here and shown in the image below.

The speed of the pointer is still slow so I did some more research and found the mouse speed is a different parameter and known as resolution as explained here.

My Question

How can increase the speed of mouse pointer for trackpad in Ubuntu 12.04.01?

Solution 1

From the synaptics man page:

Acceleration

       The MinSpeed, MaxSpeed and AccelFactor parameters control  the  pointer
       motion  speed.   The  speed  value defines the scaling between touchpad
       coordinates and  screen  coordinates.   When  moving  the  finger  very
       slowly,  the MinSpeed value is used, when moving very fast the MaxSpeed
       value is used.  When moving the finger at moderate  speed,  you  get  a
       pointer  motion  speed somewhere between MinSpeed and MaxSpeed.  If you
       don't want any acceleration, set MinSpeed  and  MaxSpeed  to  the  same
       value.

Let's try it!

$ gksudo gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf

If you have no xorg.conf file create an empty one. Add something similar to this and play around with the parameters.

Section "InputClass"
    Identifier         "Touchpad"
    Driver             "synaptics"
    MatchIsTouchpad    "on"
    Option         "VertTwoFingerScroll" "on"
    Option         "HorizTwoFingerScroll" "on"
    Option         "VertScrollDelta" "85"
    Option         "HorizScrollDelta" "85"
    Option         "TapButton1" "0"
    Option         "TapButton2" "0"
    Option         "TapButton3" "0"
    Option         "MinSpeed"   "0.7"
    Option         "MaxSpeed"   "1.4"
    Option         "AccelFactor"   "0.1"
EndSection

It's possible that the Identifier should be set to "Apple Magic Trackpad" but I'm not sure. I think "Touchpad" should work.

You should also know that I pulled these numbers in the proposed config out of thin air and that a gazillion options are available.

You can test Options for your current session with synclient. This way you don't have to restart X for the changes to take effect. Once you are happy with the parameters you can add/edit/remove them to your xorg.conf to make them permanent.

I am not sure if synclient is installed by default.

$ sudo apt-get install synclient

temporarily enable SHMConfig

$ synclient SHMConfig=1

test options. for example MinSpeed

$ synclient MinSpeed=0.5

for a detailed list of options and their values run

$ man synaptics

press j to scroll down

press k to scroll up

press / to search for a string, press n for next match, p for previous match

press ? for reverse search

press q to quit

Enjoy

Solution 2

For other people looking for a way to fix this, the Pointing Devices GUI program works straight away and doesn't disable tap to click.

sudo apt-get install gpointing-device-settings

Comments

[Gaurav Agarwal]

@jasmines There is a difference in relation to the Trackpad between earlier versions of Ubuntu and 12.04. All your suggestion are about older versions of Ubuntu and does not help.

[Gaurav Agarwal]

Thz, it works, but now it does not recognize tap-to-click. I have a question here askubuntu.com/questions/263020/…