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How to disable touchpad on Linux

Sometimes it feels like your hardware is not co-operating and trying to argue with you. Which can be really annoying. My touchpad is always detecting my palm while trying to use the keyboard and moves the cursor to an unknown location… So I would like to let you know the easy trick to disable and enable input devices on Linux.

If you want to disable a device which is connected or integrated with your computer on Linux you can check out xinput command. To view all xinput devices you can use the command “xinput list” the output of it on my desktop computer looks like this.

⎡ Virtual core pointer id=2 [master pointer (3)]
⎜ ↳ Virtual core XTEST pointer id=4 [slave pointer (2)]
⎜ ↳ Microsoft Microsoft® SiderWinderTM X6 Keyboard id=10 [slave pointer (2)]
⎜ ↳ Microsoft SideWinder™ Mouse id=11 [slave pointer (2)]
⎣ Virtual core keyboard id=3 [master keyboard (2)]
 ↳ Virtual core XTEST keyboard id=5 [slave keyboard (3)]
 ↳ Power Button id=6 [slave keyboard (3)]
 ↳ Power Button id=7 [slave keyboard (3)]
 ↳ Sleep Button id=8 [slave keyboard (3)]
 ↳ Microsoft Microsoft® SiderWinderTM X6 Keyboard id=9 [slave keyboard (3)]

As you can see here all of the devices has an id. For example if I would like to disable input from my mouse I should use the command down below.

xinput disable 11

To enable it you should use:

xinput enable 11

You can read more about xinput command here.

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