libinput and disable-while-typing

A common issue with users typing on a laptop is that the user's palms will inadvertently get in contact with the touchpad at some point, causing the cursor to move and/or click. In the best case it's annoying, in the worst case you're now typing your password into the newly focused twitter application. While this provides some general entertainment and thus makes the world a better place for a short while, here at the libinput HQ [1] we strive to keep life as boring as possible and avoid those situations.

The best way to avoid accidental input is to detect palm touches and simply ignore them. That works ok-ish on some touchpads and fails badly on others. Lots of hardware is barely able to provide an accurate touch location, let alone enough information to decide whether a touch is a palm. libinput's palm detection largely works by using areas on the touchpad that are likely to be touched by the palms.

The second-best way to avoid accidental input is to disable the touchpad while a user is typing. The libinput marketing department [2] has decided to name this feature "disable-while-typing" (DWT) and it's been in libinput for quite a while. In this post I'll describe how exactly DWT works in libinput.

Back in the olden days of roughly two years ago we all used the synaptics X.Org driver and were happy with it [3]. Disable-while-typing was featured there through the use of a tool called syndaemon. This synaptics daemon [4] has two modes. One was to poll the keyboard state every few milliseconds and check whether a key was down. If so, syndaemon sends a command to the driver to tell it to disable itself. After a timeout when the keyboard state is neutral again syndaemon tells the driver to re-enable itself. This causes a lot of wakeups, especially during those 95% of the time when the user isn't actually typing. Or missed keys if the press + release occurs between two polls. Hence the second mode, using the RECORD extension, where syndaemon opens a second connection to the X server and end checks for key events [5]. If it sees one float past, it tells the driver to disable itself, and so on and so forth. Either way, you had a separate process that did that job. syndaemon had a couple of extra options and features that I'm not going to discuss here, but we've replicated the useful ones in libinput.

libinput has no external process, DWT is integrated into the library with a couple of smart extra features. This is made easier by libinput controlling all the devices, so all keyboard events are passed around internally to the touchpad backend. That backend then decides whether it should stop sending events. And this is where the interesting bits come in.

First, we have different timeouts: if you only hit a single key, the touchpad will re-enable itself quicker than after a period of typing. So if you use the touchpad, hit a key to trigger some UI the pointer only stops moving for a very short time. But once you type, the touchpad disables itself longer. Since your hand is now in a position over the keyboard, moving back to the touchpad takes time anyway so a longer timeout doesn't hurt. And as typing is interrupted by pauses, a longer timeout bridges over those to avoid accidental movement of the cursor.

Second, any touch started while you were typing is permanently ignored, so it's safe to rest the palm on the touchpad while typing and leave it there. But we keep track of the start time of each touch so any touch started after the last key event will work normally once the DWT timeout expires. You may feel a short delay but it should be well in the acceptable range of a tens of ms.

Third, libinput is smart enough to detect which keyboard to pair with. If you have an external touchpad like the Apple Magic Trackpad or a Logitech T650, DWT will never enable on those. Likewise, typing on an external keyboard won't disable the internal touchpad. And in the rare case of two internal touchpads [6], both of them will do the right thing. As of systemd v231 the information of whether a touchpad is internal or external is available in the ID_INPUT_TOUCHPAD_INTEGRATION udev tag and thus available to everyone, not just libinput.

Finally, modifier keys are ignored for DWT, so using the touchpad to do shift-clicks works unimpeded. This also goes for the F-Key row and the numpad if you have any. These keys are usually out of the range of the touchpad anyway so interference is not an issue here. As of today, modifier key combos work too. So hitting Ctrl+S to save a document won't disable the touchpad (or any other modifiers + key combination). But once you are typing DWT activates and if you now type Shift+S to type the letter 'S' the touchpad remains disabled.

So in summary: what we've gained from switching to libinput is one external process less that causes wakeups and the ability to be a lot smarter about when we disable the touchpad. Coincidentally, libinput has similar code to avoid touchpad interference when the trackpoint is in use.

[1] that would be me
[2] also me
[3] uphill, both ways, snow, etc.
[4] nope. this one wasn't my fault
[5] Yes, syndaemon is effectively a keylogger, except it doesn't do any of the "logging" bit a keylogger would be expected to do to live up to its name
[6] This currently happens on some Dell laptops using hid-i2c. We get two devices, one named "DLL0704:01 06CB:76AE Touchpad" or similar and one "SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad". The latter one will never send events unless hid-i2c is disabled in the kernel