Ubuntu / Linux news and application reviews.

Touchpad Indicator is an Ubuntu AppIndicator which, like the name suggests, allows you to easily enable or disable your laptop touchpad. This is useful if your laptop doesn't have a touchpad toggle key or if the key doesn't work.

touchpad indicator ubuntu

The application comes with an optional keyboard shortcut to enable/disable the touchpad, can automatically disable the touchpad when a mouse is plugged in and more.

Touchpad Indicator 0.9.5, release recently, introduces mouse wheel support for the AppIndicator so you can toggle the touchpad status by scrolling on the AppIndicator icon.

That's the only new feature added in the latest Touchpad Indicator 0.9.5, but there are also many bug fixes:
  • the touchpad is no longer reset to "on" when resuming from suspend;
  • the autostart feature has been fixed;
  • when using the "Disable touchpad when mouse plugged" option, if you unplug the mouse, the touchpad will now be enabled automatically;
  • the keyboard shortcut should now work under Ubuntu 13.04;
  • the bug that prevented some users from saving any changes made to the Touchpad Indicator preferences should be fixed;
  • other bug fixes.

Touchpad Indicator is developed by Lorenzo Carbonell from atareao.es, who's also behind other popular AppIndicators such as My Weather Indicator or Google Calendar Indicator.



Install Touchpad Indicator in Ubuntu


To add the Atareao PPA and install Touchpad in Ubuntu 13.10, 13.04 or 12.10, use the commands below:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:atareao/atareao
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install touchpad-indicator
There's also a package for Ubuntu 12.04 in the same PPA, but unfortunately it hasn't been updated to the latest Touchpad Indicator version, probably because of some dependency issues.

Report any bugs you may find @ Launchpad.