Two-Finger Scrolling Unavailable—Not

So I’m using a different laptop.  It has a touchpad for mousing around, and on the touchpad are arrows indicating you are able to use edge scrolling.  This laptop is new enough it presumably has two-finger touch sensitivity, yet for whatever reason Unity’s System Preferences showed “Two finger scrolling” as greyed.

I prefer two-finger scrolling and thus I poked around the Webz to see what I could see.

I found this question asked and answered which had a solution to enable two-finger scrolling.  Essentially the solution (work-around really) is a collection of three commands which enable two-finger scrolling (why it is greyed is another matter for another time).

I tested it and it worked on my machine (a Lenovo w500) as well.  Great.

As advised in the article one could add those three lines as part of one’s start-up scripts (.bashrc in most cases), but I was feeling differently.  First I consolidated those three lines into one line using double-ampersands.  Then I created an alias called touchpad which contained those three-now-one lines of code.

Confusedly, this work-around only remained effective until the machine went to sleep.  I would understand any logout, but you’ll see from the code that this effects X and X must relaunch after sleep (or at least changes state enough to reset this).

Checking the man page for alias (which I had to find on-line as my bash in Ubuntu 14.04 doesn’t have it) I found that I could make an alias persist (or at least make it get recreated) by adding it to my .bash_aliases file in my home directory.

Now it works great.  I have added that alias to each user account I use on this laptop so it is easy to call.  Perhaps one day I’ll add the work-around elsewhere so I won’t have to instantiate it, but for now I have this.

Below you will see the code I used.  I hope this helps you today.

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#!/bin/bash
# by JamesIsIn from JamesIsIn.com
# Do something nice today.

# Here is my alias. The code between the single quotes is what you would need if your aim was merely to test-fix your touchpad.

alias touchpad='xinput --set-prop --type=int --format=32 "SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad" "Synaptics Two-Finger Pressure" 4 && xinput --set-prop --type=int --format=32 "SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad" "Synaptics Two-Finger Width" 8 && xinput --set-prop --type=int --format=8 "SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad" "Synaptics Two-Finger Scrolling" 1 0'

# Here is my .bash_aliases file.

cat .bash_aliases
# command to enable two-finger scrolling

alias touchpad='xinput --set-prop --type=int --format=32 "SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad" "Synaptics Two-Finger Pressure" 4 && xinput --set-prop --type=int --format=32 "SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad" "Synaptics Two-Finger Width" 8 && xinput --set-prop --type=int --format=8 "SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad" "Synaptics Two-Finger Scrolling" 1 0'

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