Automatically Disable Touchpad When Mouse Plugs In Ubuntu [Touchpad-indicator]

Touchpad-indicator is an Ubuntu app-indicator applet for which displays the current status of your touchpad and allows automatically and manually disabling it. The best part about this applet is that it can be used to automatically disable the touchpad when a mouse is plugged in and to re-enable it when the mouse is plugged out. This can be helpful for gamers who may only use the mouse for playing games or for users who prefer switching between the touchpad and mouse on a periodic basis.

Furthermore, you can also avoid accidental taps on the touchpad which may result in an unwanted effect such as the termination of an ongoing process or closing an important window.

You can install Touchpad-indicator from the PPA given below by enterting the following commands in the Terminal:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:atareao/atareao
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install touchpad-indicator

Once Touchpad-indicator is installed, launch it from the Unity Dash and go to Preferences from the app-indicator menu. You can also use this menu to manually enable or disable the Touchpad, hide the system tray icon and to exit Touchpad-indicator.

Disable

The Preferences window allows setting custom hotkey for disabling the Touchpad, auto starting it with system start up, starting Touchpad-indicator with the system tray icon hidden and changing the Touchpad-indicator icon theme.

Options

You can also download and compile the source package of Touchpad-indicator from the Launchpad link given below.

Download Touchpad-indicator