How to NOT disable touchpad while typing?

Question

In Elementary OS 0.4 Loki, the default behavior is to disable the touchpad while typing. However, this is undesired, especially while playing games. I want to be able to type and use the touchpad at the same time.

I checked the Settings app, and found nothing to disable this undesired functionality.

How do I enable the touchpad while typing?

Answer 1

TLDR You can enable touchpad (that is disable auto-disable) with xinput set-prop DEVICE PROP 0 where you can check for your device ID and prop ID with xinput and xinput get-props DEVICE respectively.

Let's explain this a little bit: there is a new interface to do this in elementary OS 0.4 Loki xinput. In a terminal window you should look for your touchpad device:

user@machine:~$  xinput
⎡ Virtual core pointer                          id=2    [master pointer  (3)]
⎜   ↳ Virtual core XTEST pointer                id=4    [slave  pointer  
⎜   ↳ SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad                id=14   [slave  pointer  (2)]
⎣ Virtual core keyboard                         id=3    [master keyboard (2)]
    ↳ Virtual core XTEST keyboard               id=5    [slave  keyboard (3)]
⋮

In my case the device id is 14, so now you can get its properties

user@machine:~$ xinput list-props 14
Device 'SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad':
    Device Enabled (154):   1
⋮
    libinput Disable While Typing Enabled (314):    1
    libinput Disable While Typing Enabled Default (315):    1
⋮

The prop ID is 314 (and it is set to 1 that is, auto-disable is turned on) so now we can set disable this feature:

user@machine:~$ xinput set-prop 14 314 0

Answer 2

If you have a Synaptic Touchpad with synclient installed you can use :

synclient TouchpadOff=0

0 = enabled 1 = disabled 2 = disabled while typing

source : https://doc.ubuntu-fr.org/touchpad#activerdesactiver_le_pave_tactile (french)