Re: X: standard method for "switching off" left mouse button?

[gebser@ameritech.net]

Ca va.  I experienced exactly the same very annoying problem.  The
best/quickest solution I found was to plug a regular mouse into the
laptop.

Another note: any emacs solution you implement should work only when the 
focus is on emacs, meaning that if the mouse pointer is on, say, a 
terminal window, when you accidently touch the mousepad, it'll bring up 
that terminal window.  So the disabling of the mouse should be done in 
X; look in /etc/X11/XF86Config* for the mouse section.  The problem with 
this "solution", however, is that you'd have to restart X every time you 
wanted to disable or enable the mouse... probably as much a hassle as 
dealing with touchpad accidents.

Now for a completely crazy idea: /dev/mouse is a symlink to /dev/psaux.  
It could possibly, conceivably, theoretically be possibly theoretically 
conceivable to disable the mouse by removing /dev/mouse and then enable 
it again with "ln -s /dev/psaux /dev/mouse".  You might try that (on 
your boss's computer when he's not around).  I'd be curious to know if 
that works, but not curious enough to try it on my own box.  B^+


hth,
ken

-- 
Thanks for your help with the revolution.
                              -- G. Washington


At 23:10 (UTC+0100) on 29 Mar 2003 Florian von Savigny said:

= 
= I thought this might be a common problem with laptops: I am using a
= laptop with a touchpad (or whatever that's called) which has the
= feature that tapping on it is transmitted as a left mouse button
= click. Because of its position, my hands cannot stay away from the
= touch pad (right between them) while touch-typing, and every few
= minutes, they generate a left mouse button click which puts point in
= an awkward position ... it is very annoying, especially if you
= recognize it some ten keystrokes later ...
= 
= I think I'd be able to go the brute force approach of redefining the
= bindings for the left mouse button to a command that does nothing, but
= I wonder whether there's a more elegant way. It would be nice to have
= a simple command to simply "suspend" the mouse bindings for the left
= button, such that I can turn them back on when I need them.
= 
= Is there any such thing around? Can anybody give me hints apart from
= that? I'd appreciate a lot.
= 
=