KDE has this wonderful helpful higly-sensical option (via system settings) to disable the touchpad while another mouse is plugged in - since it is a terrible pain ita while typing (accidental touch will reorient cursor or worse). Of course we all use it on the laptop compy.


These days you get reasonably priced and compact keyboard/touchpad combinations (e.g. rapoo), very compact and well made. But you gessed it:

To save space, the touchpad sits right next to the KBD and is hit inadvertendly by the right hand often times which is a terrible nuisance while typing. 

The touchpad, however, looks like a mouse to Linux, so in system settings one is not allowed to disable it and use a hotkey/shortcut to switch it ON/OFF. That is so convenient with real touchapds.

I'd imagine, the modification to allow both mice AND touchpads to be switched off or have some plug-in automatism like we already have ought to be moderate.


Of course, you'd want to safeguard users from disabling their real and only mouse. But with such a keyboard, users would want just that. Ideally also making sure there is a hotkey to switch on the mouse back. That logic probably required extra programming.

Still though, those combos with no option to get rid of the mouse have ultra-poor usability.

Or maybe some little extra DBUS call may be helpful, activated by hotkey rather than system settings to temporarily get rid of the only mouse attached in KDE?