Disable touchpad while typing

I have a nice laptop with a big touchpad (Asus UX305) but it is so big that you end up touching it everytime… And it was driving me crazy.

There is a small application that can be run as a daemon and that does exactly what I needed: disable the touchpad while are typing and re-enable it after some configurable delays.

The tool is named syndaemon and is part of the xf86-input-synaptics package.

Below is a sample command to start it as a daemon with 0.5 seconds delay:

syndaemon -d -k -i 0.5s

Description of the options:

• -d start as a daemon (background process)

• -k ignore modifier keys when monitoring keyboard activity.

• -i how many seconds to wait after the last key press before enabling the touchpad. (default is 2.0s).