Enabling touchpad tapping after installing dwm on Arch Linux

Question

I installed Arch Linux and dwm window manager. But the tapping of touchpad doesn't work.

I know how to enable the tapping; I find the id of my touchpad, using this command:

~ xinput --list
Virtual core pointer                          id=2    [master pointer  (3)]
  ↳ Elan Touchpad                             id=10   [slave  pointer  (2)]

I can see that the id is 10. Then I can list its properties:

~ xinput --list-props 10
Device 'Elan Touchpad':
    Device Enabled (172):   1
    libinput Tapping Enabled (307): 0

Here I can see that property of tapping with the id of 307 is not set to 1, so it's not enabled, I can enable it with this command:

xinput --set-prop 10 307 1

And it works. Now I wanted to write a script to automate this process, so I don't have to do it everytime I reboot. I wrote this script:

#!/bin/bash

touchpad_id=$(xinput --list | awk '/Touchpad/ {print $5}' | tr -d 'id=')
tapping_id=$(xinput --list-props $touchpad_id | awk '/libinput Tapping Enabled \(/ {print $4}' | tr -d '():')

# Enable Tapping
xinput --set-prop $touchpad_id $tapping_id 1

And this script works when I run it in the terminal (using ./touchpad_click.sh).

Next, I modified the dwm source code to run a script everytime it starts. I added the below function between the run(void) and scan(void) functions of dwm.c:

void
runAutostart(void) {
        system("~/.dwm/autostart.sh &");
}

Added its header:

static void runAutostart(void);

And called the function in main(), right before calling run():

scan();
runAutostart();
run();

And then compiled the dwm.c file with sudo make install. Compiled successfully.

And then wrote this script, autostart.sh:

#!/bin/bash

# Enable Tapping for Touchpad
./touchpad_click.sh

And put both autostart.sh and touchpad_click.sh in the ~/.dwm directory. I also made sure to give both files execute permission:

chmod +x autostart.sh touchpad_click.sh

And I verify that by:

~ ls -lhA
-rwxr-xr-x 1 amir amir  63 Feb 25 18:07 autostart.sh
-rwxr-xr-x 1 amir amir 259 Feb 25 18:07 touchpad_click.sh

---

Now the problem is that it doesn't work, and when I terminate dwm by Shift+Alt+Q shortcut, or when I reboot the system, the tapping of the touchpad is disabled. How can I fix this?

Answer 1

I think you don't need to build dwm youself and write a special script which setup xinput properties. You can just use Xorg configuration file instead: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Libinput#Via_Xorg_configuration_file

Create a file /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/30-touchpad.conf that contains this:

Section "InputClass"
    Identifier "touchpad catchall"
    Driver "libinput"
    Option "Tapping" "on"
EndSection

and restart Xorg.