The first (and only) thing I disliked when I moved from using the Lenovo T420 to the Lenovo T440s laptop was the touchpad on the T440s. T440s has a Apple-ish touchpad which can seem unfriendly (compared to the fantastic T420 touchpad with physical touch buttons), but becomes quite usable with experience. The following configuration tweaks the touchpad driver to allow the following.

  • Two finger touch for right click
  • Three finger touch for middle click
  • Two finger vertical and horizontal scroll
  • Edge scroll
  • Palm detect (to avoid unwanted clicks while typing)

To get the above features, add the following to the end of the file /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/50-synaptics.conf (edit as root).

# custom touchpad settings
# view current values with synclient -l
Section "InputClass"
    Identifier "touchpad catchall"
    Driver "synaptics"
    MatchIsTouchpad "on"
    MatchDevicePath "/dev/input/event*"
    Option "TapButton1" "1"
    Option "TapButton2" "3"
    Option "TapButton3" "2"
    Option "HorizTwoFingerScroll" "on"
    Option "VertTwoFingerScroll" "on"
    Option "HorizEdgeScroll" "1"
    Option "VertEdgeScroll" "1"
    Option "HorizHysteresis" "30"
    Option "VertHysteresis" "30"
    Option "PalmDetect" "1"
    Option "RTCornerButton" "0"
    Option "RBCornerButton" "0"
    Option "LTCornerButton" "0"
    Option "LBCornerButton" "0"
EndSection

The RTCornerButton, RBCornerButton, LTCornerButton, LBCornerButton options specify what clicking on the corners of the toucpad does. In this case, they don’t do anything special, but can be configured to do something special like a right click or middle click.

You can view all the current options for your touchpad with

$ synclient -l

You can then use these options to further configure your touchpad.