syndaemon - Man Page

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

Synopsis

syndaemon [-i idle-time] [-m poll-inverval] [-d] [-p pid-file] [-t] [-k] [-K] [-R]

Description

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

Options

-i <idle-time>: How many seconds to wait after the last key press before enabling the touchpad. (default is 2.0s).
-m <poll-interval>: How many milliseconds to wait between two polling intervals. If this value is too low, it will cause unnecessary wake-ups. If this value is too high, some key presses (press and release happen between two intervals) may not be noticed. This switch has no effect when running with -R. Default is 200ms.
-d: Start as a daemon, ie in the background.
-p <pid-file>: Create a pid file with the specified filename. A pid file will only be created if the program is started in daemon mode.
-t: Only disable tapping and scrolling, not mouse movements, in response to keyboard activity.
-k: Ignore modifier keys when monitoring keyboard activity.
-K: Like -k but also ignore Modifier+Key combos.
-R: Use the XRecord extension for detecting keyboard activity instead of polling the keyboard state.
-?: Show the help message.

Environment Variables

DISPLAY: Specifies the X server to contact.

Exit Codes

If syndaemon exists with a return code other than 0, the error encountered is as below.

Exit code 1: Invalid commandline argument.
Exit code 2: The connection to the X sever could not be established or no touchpad device could be found.
Exit code 3: The fork into daemon mode failed or the pid file could not be created.
Exit code 4: XRECORD requested but not available or usable on the server.

Caveats

It doesn't make much sense to connect to a remote X server, because the daemon will then monitor the remote server for keyboard activity, but will disable the touchpad on the local machine.