How to enable ubuntu 18.04 or above Touchpad Tap-to-click

Ubuntu 18.04 disables the Tap-to-click of most touch pad, specifically Thinkpad or Dell laptop which use Synaptics. It is annoying to me that the default behavior changes. If it is same to you, no worry. I will give you a solid approach to enable it.


First, find the device of your touch pad as below command.

xinput list

Output is probably like this:

We got the touch pad name and id. However, id is subject to change as we sometimes attach more/less hardware to the computer. So it is better to use name when we change settings. But we can use id to simplify our input when investigate device properties.

Second, dig out the property that control the behavior of Tap-to-click.

xinput list-props 13

The 'Tapping Enabled(294)' is the property to manage this behavior. It is set to 0 that is why the behavior is disabled. If we can change it by below command:

xinput set-int-prop 'SynPS/2 Synaptics Touchpad' 294 8 1

The Tab-to-click will be enabled. I don't want to execute above command every time I login. So we create a Desktop Entry file which will auto-start every time I login GUI session.

The file is to be stored at the location of ~/.config/autostart. Its content is going to be as this:

#!/usr/bin/env xdg-open
[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Name=xinputSynaptics
Terminal=false
Exec=~/.config/autostart/xinputsynaptics.sh
Icon=system-run
X-GNOME-Autostart-enabled=true

And we create a file xinputsynaptics.sh with content in same directory:

exec xinput set-int-prop 'SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad' 294 8 1

Do not forget change the file mode to 744 so that it can be executed.

Logout and re-login. The Tap-to-click shall be enabled.