Quickly Toggle Your Touchpad in Linux

For me it is often frustrating trying to use my laptop’s touchpad to do anything that requires even the slightest bit of accuracy, so I use an external mouse whenever possible. Unfortunately, the placement of the touchpad means that I will invariably end up touching it with my palms while I type. Today I finally had enough and decided to take matters into my own hands. The following script will allow you to either toggle your touchpad based upon it’s current setting, or to explicitly turn your touchpad on or off (perhaps as an event to be fired when you plug in or unplug an external mouse). Without further ado:

# toggleTouchpad by Brendon Dugan
# Toggles a touchpad on or off depending on it's current state or CLI argument
#
# To configure, run the command 'xinput list' in terminal and identify your touch pad.
# Using the output of the above command, change the touchpadString variable to a substring
# of your touchpad's description that is unique to that device.
#
# To run, simply type 'toggleTouchpad' to toggle your touchpad on or off, or
# 'toggleTouchpad on' to explicitly turn your touchpad on, or
# 'toggleTouchpad off' to explicitly turn it off.
#
# Enjoy!
touchpadString="TouchPad"
touchpadID=$(xinput list | grep "$touchpadString" | awk -F " " '{print $6}' | awk -F "=" '{print $2}')
touchpadEnabled=$(xinput list-props $touchpadID | grep "Device Enabled" | awk -F ":" '{print $2}')

# Check for arguments on the command line
if test $# -eq 1
then
	# Change the argument to lowercase
	arg1=$(echo $1 | tr [:upper:] [:lower:])
	cliArg=1
else
	# There is no argument.
	cliArg=0
fi

if [ $cliArg -eq 1 ]
then
	# If there's an argument, check to see whether it is on, off, or junk
	if [ $arg1 = 'on' ]
	then
		# The argument was 'on', so turn the touchpad on
		xinput --set-prop $touchpadID "Device Enabled" 1
	elif [ $arg1 = 'off' ]
	then
		# The argument was 'off', so turn the touchpad off
		xinput --set-prop $touchpadID "Device Enabled" 0
	else
		# The argument was junk, so do nothing
		sleep 1
	fi
else
	# There was no argument, so just toggle the touchpad to the opposite
	# of the state it has now.
	if [ $touchpadEnabled -eq 1 ]
	then
		xinput --set-prop $touchpadID "Device Enabled" 0
	else
		xinput --set-prop $touchpadID "Device Enabled" 1
	fi
fi

Posted by Brendon Dugan on November 16, 2010

https://brennydoogles.wordpress.com/2010/11/16/quickly-toggle-your-touchpad-in-linux/