So after having the edge of my hand touch my touchpad and mess up an email for the upteenth time today I went around and did some research to see if there was a quick shortcut key or something I could press to turn the bloody thing off and then on again when I was done typing. Well let me tell you I found something so much better! There’s a command in shell that will automatically disable the touchpad if you’ve been typing for a set amount of time and then turn it back on automatically when you’re done.. Genius! Genius I say!! But what is this command you ask? How do you enable it to save yourself endless frustration? Well I’m glad you asked because I was just about to explain it:
The program is syndaemon and it can be enabled in shell by typing: syndaemon -i 3 -d
Where
- -i parameter defines number of seconds to wait after keyboard is used – ( 3 seconds suites me. )
- -d parameter is used for running syndaemon in background mode ( as a daemon ).
If above command throws some error then you are using other than 9.04 release. To get it working type in terminal,
wget http://people.ubuntuwire.com/~fujitsu/syndaemon chmod +x syndaemon sudo mv syndaemon /usr/bin/ syndaemon -i 3 -d
Again type the syndaemon command in terminal, it shouldn`t give any error messages.
Above command has to be executed each time machine is rebooted. To execute above command automatically we can create a tiny bash script and add it to startup items.
1. Create a new file somewhere ( My BSD habits puts files like this in /usr/local/etc/rc.d/ but that’s just me ) and copy paste following into it.
#!/bin/bash syndaemon -i 2.5 -d
2. To add above script to startup items, go to System > Preferences > Startup Applicaitons > Add. In new pop-up box name it something meaningful and type in the path and command.. After that click “Add”.
There you go, done like dinner 
Enjoy not having the hell of your cursor selecting 2 paragraphs of text and typing over it before you know what’s going on!
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