by Kacoroski, Ski

Setting up a Thinkpad with clickpad

Work upgraded me to a new Thinkpad T440p which has the new clickpad with a single physical button in the clickpad instead of the three separate buttons on the older T410 that I was using.  So how do I get the one clickpad button to act like a three button mouse.  After a bit of playing around I came up with the following solution:

  1. Create /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d directory if you do not already have it
  2. Create 50-synaptics.conf file in that directory with these contents:

# /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/50-synaptics.conf  (MagicMint) M0427
# Additional options may be added in the form of
#   Option "OptionName" "value"
# See man synaptics (4) for details

Section "InputClass"
 Identifier "touchpad ignore duplicates"
 # Ignore events from old driver
 MatchIsTouchpad "on"
 MatchOS "Linux"
 MatchDevicePath "/dev/input/mouse*"
 Option "Ignore" "on"
EndSection

Section "InputClass"
 Identifier "touchpad catchall"
 # Device
 Driver "synaptics"
 MatchIsTouchpad "on"
 MatchDevicePath "/dev/input/event*"

 # Palm detection
 Option "PalmDetect" "on"
 Option "PalmMinWidth" "4"
 Option "PalmMinZ" "1"

 # Dragging & tapping
 Option "LockedDrags" "on"
 Option "FastTaps" "on"
 Option "AccelFactor" "0.1028806" #2x
 Option "MinSpeed" "1"
 Option "MaxSpeed" "1.75"

 # For hardware debugging only
 Option "SHMConfig" "on"
EndSection

Section "InputClass"
 Identifier "Default clickpad buttons"
 # Lacking mouse buttons
 MatchDriver "synaptics"
 Option "LTCornerButton" "8"

 # Right-handed pad w/ middle button on the right side
 #Option "SoftButtonAreas" "RBL RBR RBT RBB MBL MBR MBT MBB"
 Option "SoftButtonAreas" "3750 4858 0 0 2500 3749 0 0"

 # Set AreaTopEdge to be the entire pad so it ignores any motions
 # This essentially disables the touchpad so just the click buttons work
 Option "AreaTopEdge" "5000"

EndSection

Section "InputClass"
 Identifier "Multi-finger taps"
 MatchDriver "synaptics"

 # The following works only via synclient
 Option "TapButton1" "1"
 Option "TapButton2" "3"
 Option "TapButton3" "2"
EndSection
 

The key changes I made are to the SoftButtonAreas and AreaTopEdge.  The SoftButtonAreas option divides the clickpad into three columns.  So when you press it, it knows which column you are in and sends a right, middle, or left mouse click to the OS.  The AreaTopEdge option turns off mouse movement on the clickpad so you have to use the trackpoint for moving the mouse.  This works great for me as now my fingers do not accidentally move the mouse when I brush the clickpad.  You may need to adjust the numbers in the SoftBUttonAreas option depending on the size of your clickpad