Productivity Sauce

Dmitri Popov

There is nothing more annoying than accidentally tapping the touchpad on the notebook while typing. This causes the cursor to jump to a random place in the document, and before you know it, you are typing text in the middle of another sentence. Some notebooks allow you to temporary disable the touchpad, but if your mobile companion doesn't have this feature, the syndaemon utility provides a simple yet effective solution to the problem. When activated, the utility disables the touchpad when it detects keyboard activity and enables it as soon as you stop typing. In fact, syndaemon is much more convenient in use than a dedicated hardware switch on your notebook, as the utility enables and disables the touchpad automatically. So even if your notebook does have a touchpad switch, you can still benefit from using syndaemon.

On Ubuntu and its derivatives, syndaemon is installed by default, so you can run it by executing the syndaemon command in the terminal. The utility supports a few parameters. The -d parameter starts syndaemon as a daemon in the background, while the -i parameter lets you specify the time in seconds before syndaemon kicks in and disables the touchpad (the default value is 2 seconds).

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