Get a rock-solid Linux touchpad configuration for the Lenovo X1 Carbon

The X1 Carbon’s touchpad has been my nemesis in Linux for quite some time because of its high sensitivity. I’d often find the cursor jumping over a few pixels each time I tried to tap to click. This was aggravating at first, but then I found myself closing windows when I wanted them minimized or confirming something in a dialog that I didn’t want to confirm.

Last December, I wrote a post about some fixes. However, as I force myself to migrate to Linux (no turning back this time) again, my fixes didn’t work well enough. I stumbled upon a post about the X1’s touchpad and how an Ubuntu user found a configuration file that seemed to work well.

Just as a timesaver, I’ve reposted his configuration here:

# softlink this file into:
# /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d

# and prevent the settings app from overwriting our settings:
# gsettings set org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.mouse active false


Section "InputClass"
    Identifier "nathan touchpad catchall"
    MatchIsTouchpad "on"
    MatchDevicePath "/dev/input/event*"
    Driver "synaptics"

    # three fingers for the middle button
    Option "TapButton3" "2"
    # drag lock
    Option "LockedDrags" "1"
    # accurate tap-to-click!
    Option "FingerLow" "50"
    Option "FingerHigh" "55"

    # prevents too many intentional clicks
    Option "PalmDetect" "0"

    # "natural" vertical and horizontal scrolling
    Option "VertTwoFingerScroll" "1"
    Option "VertScrollDelta" "-75"
    Option "HorizTwoFingerScroll" "1"
    Option "HorizScrollDelta" "-75"

    Option "MinSpeed" "1"
    Option "MaxSpeed" "1"

    Option "AccelerationProfile" "2"
    Option "ConstantDeceleration" "4"
EndSection

Many many thanks to Nathan Hamblen for assembling this configuration and offering it out to the masses on his blog.