FreeBSD: Disable Your Lenovo Trackpad ·

It’s taken me longer than I would’ve liked to work this one out but I’ve finally managed to disable the trackpad on my Lenovo X131e while still leaving the trackpoint (stick) working.

Enable moused

If you’re running a graphical environment then you’ve most likely already completed this step, but if not, you need to add the following to your /etc/rc.conf:

moused_enable="YES"

Enable Synaptics Support

You’ll then need to enable synaptics support by adding the following to your /boot/loader.conf:

hw.psm.synaptics_support="1"

This gives you access to the additional synaptics configuration values covered on the FreeBSD wiki.

Disable Tap To Click

Aragon on the FreeBSD forums suggests adding the following to /etc/sysctl.conf to disable tap to click. It works really well but isn’t really what I was looking for:

hw.psm.tap_timeout=0

Disable Trackpad

I wanted to totally disable the trackpad so I could use the trackpoint and keyboard without ever even moving the mouse. I found adding the following to your /etc/sysctl.conf works really well for this. Let me know if you have a more elegant / correct solutions for this:

hw.psm.synaptics.min_pressure=220

This sets the min_pressure to be the same as the max_pressure.

Update - 26/07/2017

I thought I might as well add this here as it’s not really worth it’s own post.

Enable Middle Button Scrolling

The Trackpoint is a pain to use if you don’t have middle button scrolling enabled. To get this working simply add the following to your /etc/rc.conf:

moused_flags="-V"

$ man moused
...
-V      Enable 'Virtual Scrolling'. With this option set, holding the
        middle mouse button down will cause motion to be interpreted as
        scrolling.  Use the -U option to set the distance the mouse must
        move before the scrolling mode is activated and the -L option to
        set the scrolling speed.
...