Palm detection does not work near edges

[aplund]

I have the ignore palm option set with a fairly small threshold for palm detection. However I can always trigger a click if I rest my palm right near the edge of the trackpad. This results in the cursor moving or the active windows changing whilst typing which is very frustrating.

[rynbrd]

Palm detection is a black art at best. Tracking palms at the edge of the pad is much more difficult and poses a number of problems. Please take a look at dispad, the trackpad disabler. It is a much better solution to this problem.

I will keep this ticket open as I still have not come up with a good solution internal to the driver.

[ssaavedra]

Maybe the driver could have a lower tap-sensibility on the (let's say) 20% of both edges.

BTW, Is there any way that we can draw what the keypad "sees"?

[rynbrd]

That's not a bad idea.

As for drawing taps, you'd need to add code to the mtrack state tracking to send events via shared memory and write an app to read from that.

[ssaavedra]

Ok, drawing stuff is not so trivial (I thought maybe X had some other mechanism to poll that directly, and that there could be an application in userland for that).

I've sent you an email.

[galexander1]

Just an FYI - you can view the raw event stream using "evtest /dev/input/eventX". I don't know of anything that will display that garphically, though an SDL app for it would actually be pretty trivial. :)

[jordansissel]

I have a similar probelm with my palms triggering mouse movement and scrolling when resting on the edges of the touchpad (while typing). I disable tap since my macbook has a clicky touchpad that I prefer to press.

Proposal: Since there's already a BottomEdge setting, what about having a RightEdge and LeftEdge settings that work similarly? I might be able to provide a PR that supports this, but I haven't checked the code.

Thoughts? @BlueDragonX?

[jordansissel]

Had a quick glance at the code. (https://github.com/BlueDragonX/xf86-input-mtrack/blob/56f98311308348d545540c0642872dce7b4015d6/src/mtstate.c#L240-L243) - I'll have a go implementing this and get back to y'all. No ETA, though, as time permits :)

<3 for this driver.

[galexander1]

The patch to change it to EdgeSize instead of BottomEdge (pull request #46) was merged into the dev branch. I had to revisit that lately, and wished I had made a setting for each edge, like you say.

shrug

The code is simple and clean. If you make such a PR, i'll pull it for my personal laptop :)

On Mon, Jul 20, 2015 at 04:04:09PM -0700, Jordan Sissel wrote:

I have the same probelm with my palms triggering mouse movement and scrolling when resting on the edges of the touchpad (while typing).

Since there's already a BottomEdge setting, what about having a RightEdge and LeftEdge settings that work similarly? I might be able to provide a PR that supports this, but I haven't checked the code.

Thoughts? @BlueDragonX?

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Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub: https://github.com/BlueDragonX/xf86-input-mtrack/issues/30#issuecomment-123083207

[p2rkw]

@galexander1: do you know why dev branch wasn't merged into master? For me it looks fine...

[galexander1]

Just not a very active project...it works pretty well how it is so there's not a huge incentive to churn new releases.

[jordansissel]

@galexander1 based on what @p2rkw said, I also don't see the EdgeSize change in master, but it is in dev. So which branch should I be working on? Master and dev branches have some deviation (git rebase doesn't work in either direction).

[galexander1]

I would guess it will get out sooner if it's based on dev, but I don't know anything about release plans...

[p2rkw]

@jordansissel I merged dev into my master branch recently, you may take a look if you want to. Unfortunately I did on top my local changes. I would like to push them back, but BlueDragonX seems to be inactive last days.

[rynbrd]

I come around periodically...work keeps me busy. If you could see my private github history you'd go nuts =P

I'll see if I can free up a few cycles to take a look in a bit.

[rynbrd]

And yes, please work against dev. I pull changes from dev into master. I'll try and do a release before the end of the month, there are a number of nice PR's people have submitted.