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Just got a new #Linux laptop and found that minimizing windows would sometimes just kill them. 😕 After 20 minutes of trying to consistently reproduce, I found that clicking in the bottom middle of the touchpad caused these windows to close. 🤔
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Apparently, middle clicking a window tab closes the window and I was doing this on accident with the tough pad. 🤯 Ok, I guess I'll just disable it in settings... Except there is no setting which disables *just* middle click without *also* disabling right click. 😤
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Eventually, I found this thread and I was able to fix the problem by using
xinput
to remap the touch pad. 😌 unix.stackexchange.com/questions/438725/disabling-middle-click-on-bottom-of-a-clickpad-touchpad -
This worked great for about 10 minutes. However, like all #Linux configs executed on the terminal, it doesn't persist after restart. I also can't just add it to my
.bashrc
because I don't want to open a terminal on startup every time! 😩 -
I then found out about
~/.xsessionrc
, which serves the same purpose but runs on login. Fortunately, I can just copy myxinput
command there. I'm just glad I didn't have to dive into services andsystemctl
. 🤢 askubuntu.com/questions/20298/how-to-make-xinput-settings-persist-after-devices-are-unplugged-replugged-and -
How do we expect users to figure this stuff out? My hand position on the touchpad is slightly off, and as punishment I have to go through all this? I can only imagine some QA tester encountered this and the bug got marked WAI. 😞 #YearOfTheLinuxDesktop
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Update from two months later. This suddenly decided to stop working today and I'm now accidentally middle-click closing tabs again. Double checked my ~/.xsessionrc and it seems the device ID of my touchpad changed. 🤦♂️ Some truly great UX here.
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Update++ Lately I've noticed my USB mouse middle-click not working some days. I randomly remembered this, and discovered that my mouse had taken on the ID of the track pad, so I was disabling middle click on my mouse instead of the track pad!
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Had to update
~/.xsessionrc
to dynamically find the track pad:DEVICE_ID=$(xinput | grep "Synaptics" | sed -E "s/^.*id=([0-9]+).*$/\1/g") xinput set-button-map "${DEVICE_ID}" 1 1 3 4 5 6 7
It goes without saying that fixing this should not be a multi-month effort...