New Touchpad management app in Kubuntu 14.04

Hot on the heels of the new driver manager, we have the new touchpad management app that we introduced in Kubuntu 14.04.

New Touchpad KCM

The new app replaces the old Synaptiks touchpad management app and has many more buttons and settings that you can twiddle and tweak to get the best experience. The Kubuntu team would like to thank Alexander Mezin for working on this replacement app as part of his GSoC project. The package comes complete with its own plasmoid for easy access to enable and disable touchpads! Quite useful for folks who don’t have a physical hardware button to Enable/Disable touchpads 😉

Users of Kubuntu 14.04 can grab the new touchpad management app from the Ubuntu repos by installing the kde-touchpad package.

39 thoughts on “New Touchpad management app in Kubuntu 14.04”

  1. Glad to see you’re inregrating it by default! It’s currently still a bit overwhelming with all those options, but I didn’t want to take that away from Alexander. I pushed him to create that testing area on the right and tons of tooltips to explain those overly technical options, though 😉

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    1. Hi Thomas !! 😀
      Yeah there are like a bazillion options there that can be a bit overwhelming, would be nice to see some more ui improvements, but I agree, with the tooltips it shouldn’t be very hard to navigate through the UI 🙂

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  2. Thanks! This is for sure a lot of progress compared to the current one. I especially look forward to the dedicated plasmoid for enabling/disabling.

    Also I very much like the fact, that a “HIG guy” was (and still is, hopefully) involved. I guess some of the problems of the old kcm, was due to the absence of such someone looking over the shoulders of the dev… (and there are much worse kcm’s in system settings).

    PS:
    Are there plans to upstream this into the KDE repos (and thus making it available for other distros)?

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    1. Not really, but feel free to pitch in a suggestion to the KDE Touchpad developer, maybe he’ll implement it and then we can include it in the next Kubuntu release 😉

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      1. I’m not the OP but it would be nice to have the ability to turn on off scrolling via the middle button, and (if possible) change the speed of the pointer independently from that of the trackpad.

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      2. Please file feature requests on the KDE Bugtracker.

        Regards Rohan Garg

        On Thu, Feb 27, 2014 at 4:22 PM, shadeslayer's Blog wrote:

        >

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  4. Does this offer the ability to disable the track pad when a mouse is plugged in or the ability to temporarily disable when you type like synaptics does?

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  6. oh joy, i wonder if it works for elantech pads. ‘tho you’ve made my day with that news anyway.
    Now to poke rdieter to push it to redhat-kde repos

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  7. I disagree with the people saying it’s too complex. One would only open this KCM if you want to overly adjust every detail. The defaults are fine, most people will never open this. (I certainly have never needed to, and I’m quite a nerd)

    If your target audience is people who want to control every detail, you need a control for every detail.. which is what this is aiming for.

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  9. Well, I for one am really looking forward to this. I don’t care how complex it is, I’ll figure
    it out when I get there.
    Fantastic!

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  10. I mean it’s great to be able to configure all these details if need arises without fiddling with xorg.conf, but you should really consider hiding them behind an “advanced” button. Every “normal” user will just think OMG! and run away 😉 The primary interface of the touchpad config should just let you configure the high level options that everyone understands, like what happens on click with 1,2,3 fingers? what happens on swipe left/right with 1,2,3 fingers? etc.

    Oh, and will it support MacBook touch pads as well? Where you for instance click the entire touchpad?

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      1. Well, the question was more if it supports the special features (No idea if there are other notebooks out there which have that as well nowadays) of the Mac touch pads, like 1,2 or 3 finger clicks or multitouch gestures?

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      2. It can support 3 finger taps, but not multitouch gestures at the moment ( hint: checkout the screenshot 😉

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  14. Is there an option to reverse the scrolling direction when using the touch pad (without changing the behaviour of the scroll wheel of the mouse)?

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