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Goodbye OSX – part #6: finetuning the trackpad settings using synaptics client (in my case: for macbook pro 15″ mid-2012)

Yesterday i did the first native tests (before that, i’ve been testing inside a parallels virtual machine).

Surprisingly, both Elementary OS “Freya” as well as kali 2.0 seem to be working pretty well on my mid-2012 macbook pro out of the box.
trackpad, graphics, wlan, screen + keyboard brightness, audio … all working out of the box. that’s nice, isn’t it!?

fan control is easy to do, by using either “mbpfan” or “macfanctld“.

However, i didn’t like the way the trackpad was configured. i’m a big fan of real phyiscal clicking, and a lower right click should emulate the right mouse button. – So here are my adjustments:

synclient MaxSpeed=4.5
synclient MinSpeed=0.25
synclient AccelFactor=0.015
synclient RightButtonAreaLeft=4500
synclient RightButtonAreaTop=3500
synclient RightButtonAreaBottom=5000
synclient FingerLow=25
synclient FingerHigh=30

… which basically means, i want to actually do the physical click (not only tap). clicking the lower right corner on the trackpad should act as my “right mouse button”, and i don’t like the two-finger-click in the middle of the trackpad (which gets disabled by setting ClickFinger2=1). the values for RightButtonAreaLeft and RightButtonAreaLeft can be calculated by subtracting ca. 500 from RightEdge and BottomEdge. Those values are displayed wenn running “synclient” without parameters and basically building a x/y coordinate system for the area of the trackpad.

In my case, these were the values:

LeftEdge = -3898
RightEdge = 4428
TopEdge = 434
BottomEdge = 6146

So RightButtonAreaLeft and RightButtonAreaTop are calculated by RightEdge – X and BottomEdge – Y, so i can freely decide how big the area for my right click is: The bigger X and Y are getting, the bigger the area for my right click will be.

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