How to enable touchpad click

Ankur Sinha, Caleb McKee, Petr Bokoc Versio F38 Last review: 2023-05-08

Scope

Fedora tries to make various desktop environments available to its users. Since Fedora tries to stay as close to upstream as possible, we follow the various defaults selected by the desktop environment upstreams. Generally, this entails a disabled touchpad click by default. This wiki page tries to compile the different methods that can be used to enable "tapping" on various desktop environments.

Please note that this is only a resource to aid our users. For discussions on this setting, please talk to the relevant DE upstream. Fedora does not intend to make any changes to upstream defaults.

Desktop configurations

This wiki page has more information about Input Device configuration. An example xorg.conf.d snippet to enable tapping is given here.

GNOME

The "mouse and touchpad" utility can be used to enable tapping and set scrolling options in GNOME. See the Official GNOME documentation

KDE Plasma Workspaces

  1. Enter KDE System Settings

  2. Choose Hardware > Input Devices > Touchpad (If the "Touchpad" setting is not there, install kcm_touchpad first, then restart System Settings. It is installed by default.)

  3. Select the Tapping tab

  4. Check the "Tap to click" checkbox

  5. Set some tapping actions under "Buttons" below, the default is to do nothing

Alternatively, the systemwide method described under Other window managers can also be used.

Xfce

  1. Enter Xfce Settings

  2. Select the Mouse and Touchpad settings

  3. If necessary, select your Touchpad device

  4. In the General section, enable "Tap touchpad to click"

Other window managers

Create a new file named /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/99-synaptics-overrides.conf.

Then, in your favourite text editor, modify this file as such:

Section  "InputClass"
    Identifier  "touchpad overrides"
    # This makes this snippet apply to any device with the "synaptics" driver
    # assigned
    MatchDriver  "synaptics"

    ####################################
    ## The lines that you need to add ##
    # Enable left mouse button by tapping
    Option  "TapButton1"  "1"
    # Enable vertical scrolling
    Option  "VertEdgeScroll"  "1"
    # Enable right mouse button by tapping lower right corner
    Option "RBCornerButton" "3"
    ####################################

EndSection

For more information on tweaking xorg.conf.d files, please read the man page:

[…]$ man xorg.conf

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