Turn off touch-to-click on Macbook trackpad on Ubuntu

The driver support for Macbook’s excellent multi-touch touchpads (2008 and beyond) are good – even multi touch scrolling works out of the box, unlike Windows (for me at least).

However, one issue I discovered (and it took me some to discover that it was not a fault of my own), is that clicks are registered on the trackpad when you touch it a little hard. The behaviour on Mac OS X and Windows is to register clicks only when the trackpad is pushed down till a click-sound is heard.

This is a nice touch when using only the trackpad, but when using the keyboard, accidental clicks happen all the time due to it. This can be fixed with an edit to mouse preferences. Go to System > Preferences > Mouse, and uncheck “Enable mouse clicks on touchpad”.

Alternative fix: I personally loved the touch-sensitive clicks on Ubuntu, for reducing effort, so much so that I now hate OS X/Windows click mechanism. To get the best of both worlds, I added a mouse lock to the top menu bar by right-clicking it > Add to panel > Pointer Capture. When I need to type, I place the mouse on it to lock it, then start typing.

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