Tap-to-click should be enabled by default for all touchpads
Hi,
Currently Tap touchpad to click
is not enabled by default.
In my experience, tap-to-click is what the majority of touchpad users use. It defaults to on
on Windows and MacOS. It seems to default to off
in GNOME and KDE, but I found this [1] [2] [3] [4] which suggests many users would like to see this changed.
This reflects my own experience assisting first-time XFCE/Linux users, who are always confused by the touchpad click "not working", then trying to figure out where to enable it, which is not a pleasant first experience.
We could do some sort of poll amongst XFCE users (forum? reddit?) but results are likely to be similar, I guess.
I have tried enabling this behavior by default in my own debian live-build config by including a custom pointers.xml
, but noticed it would not work reliably on all touchpads/machines, because the configuration file contains a hardware-dependent identifier:
# after enabling tap-to-click manually in xfce4-mouse-settings
$ cat ~/.config/xfce4/xfconf/xfce-perchannel-xml/pointers.xml
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<channel name="pointers" version="1.0">
<property name="MSFT000100_06CBCE2D_Touchpad" type="empty">
<property name="Properties" type="empty">
<property name="Synaptics_Tap_Action" type="array">
<value type="int" value="0"/>
<value type="int" value="0"/>
<value type="int" value="0"/>
<value type="int" value="0"/>
<value type="int" value="1"/>
<value type="int" value="3"/>
<value type="int" value="2"/>
</property>
<property name="libinput_Tapping_Enabled" type="int" value="1"/>
</property>
</property>
</channel>
I suggest enabling it by default for all newly detected touchpads.
Or provide a way for distributors to enable it by default, for example:
<channel name="pointers" version="1.0">
<property name="enable_tap_to_click_by_default_for_all_touchpads" type="int" value="1">