Similarly to how games can tell KWin that they'd like compositing disabled, there's another thing that it would be nice to have a hint for: temporarily turning off the feature to disable the touchpad while typing. Many games require the simultaneous use of a mouse and keyboard. When a mouse isn't available because the user is using a laptop, they use their touchpad instead. When the "disable touchpad while typing" setting is active, these kinds of games are not playable. However the setting is nice to have on at other times, so it would be nice if KWin had some kind of hint that games could tell it, which would make it disable this setting wile the game was being played.
I don't think many gamers play an FPS with a trackpad. But in any case _NET_WM_BYPASS_COMPOSITOR is a standard hint. There's no way you'd get a universally accepted new extended window manager hint to be adopted on X now, and a KDE specific one is pointless. What is relevant is there is a touchpad kded currently that has the full backend support that the KCM has. Having this toggle the libinput hint dynamically at runtime based on some user condition is feasible.
Thanks David, that makes sense. Re-titling accordingly. FWIW it's not just about FPS games; most games involve some mixture of keyboard and cursor input and this feature is problematic for all but the most sedate in pacing. My current favorite is Endless Sky (https://github.com/endless-sky/endless-sky), which is primarily keyboard-based, but selection is mouse-based. When I'm piloting my ship with the keyboard often I want to quickly click on a visible ship, which doesn't work with my laptop's touchpad when "Disable while typing" is on.
Sorry, but that is totally out of scope for the property (it's not a hint that it's a game - a VM might also validly use it) and also out of scope for KWin. KWin does not control input devices on X11.
Can you help come up with a way for "disable touchpad while typing" to get automatically turned off when playing a game?
> I don't think many gamers play an FPS with a trackpad. I do occasionally. For certain types of first person games (e.g. Gone Home, Firewatch, Everyone's Gone to the Rapture) it's fine. I've run into this bug and it's extremely annoying, and basically impossible for most users to figure out. I agree about not abusing the window hint, but "Not A Bug" is also definitely the wrong resolution here.
Sorry, but not a bug is the correct solution from KWin perspective: we don't control input devices on X11. I do not have any idea how to implement this as there's just no way to detect games. All you could do is having a list of window classes.
It's bugs.kde.org, not bugs.kwin.org. "Not A Bug" is appropriate when there's no bug, but there's a bug here. Products and titles can be changed. Having no idea doesn't make the bug go away and doesn't mean it shouldn't be tracked. Closing a ticket is data loss, and wastes the time of contributors (i.e. the bug reporter).
Sorry, but this is even not a bug for anything in kde - we cannot identify games.
No, but (as I said in the first comment) we already have a little UI+daemon for toggling on and off a touchpad, exapnding that UI to also handle turning on/off this one flag within a touchpad is IMHO feasible.
> Sorry, but this is even not a bug for anything in kde - we cannot identify games. That doesn't matter. If the system is misbehaving and ill-serving the user, it's a bug that deserves tracking, even if just to facilitate a discussion for how an industry-wide solution could look like and/or how we can bring it about. For example https://github.com/FeralInteractive/gamemode has some buy-in with games and gamers now. It has a D-Bus interface. The touchpadenabler kded module could listen to it and suspend what it's doing when in game mode.
Hello! This bug report concerns the Synaptics version of the Touchpad page, which is no longer supported in Plasma 6. Can you please see if the issue still happens when using Libinput? If so, please change the status back to "REPORTED." If not, go ahead and change it to "RESOLVED FIXED", or let the bot do it automatically after a month. Thanks!
Dear Bug Submitter, This bug has been in NEEDSINFO status with no change for at least 15 days. Please provide the requested information as soon as possible and set the bug status as REPORTED. Due to regular bug tracker maintenance, if the bug is still in NEEDSINFO status with no change in 30 days the bug will be closed as RESOLVED > WORKSFORME due to lack of needed information. For more information about our bug triaging procedures please read the wiki located here: https://community.kde.org/Guidelines_and_HOWTOs/Bug_triaging If you have already provided the requested information, please mark the bug as REPORTED so that the KDE team knows that the bug is ready to be confirmed. Thank you for helping us make KDE software even better for everyone!
This bug has been in NEEDSINFO status with no change for at least 30 days. The bug is now closed as RESOLVED > WORKSFORME due to lack of needed information. For more information about our bug triaging procedures please read the wiki located here: https://community.kde.org/Guidelines_and_HOWTOs/Bug_triaging Thank you for helping us make KDE software even better for everyone!