So I have this Macbook I’m running Ubuntu 8.10 on.  I have taps turned on as a way to click on things because that’s my general preference… but it can get me in trouble.  The thing about Macbooks is that they have huge trackpads.  It’s pretty easy to touch the trackpad while you’re typing, which will cause you to jump around mid-sentence.  Annoying.

Wouldn’t it be nice if we could disable touchpad taps while typing?

Here we go… from the terminal, try out this command:

syndaemon -dti 1

That will turn off tapping on the keypad for 1 second each time you press a key on the keyboard. What do those flags mean?

-d    Start the process as a daemon (in the background)

-t    Only disable tapping, not mouse movements.

-i #  how many seconds to disable tapping after the last keypress.

So, play with it and figure out your preferred settings.  1 second?  2 seconds?  When you are happy with how you have it set up, go to System -> Preferences -> Sessions (in Ubuntu) and add the command so it will run every time you start your computer.