External touchpad for Ubuntu?

[Colin Law]

On Mon, 21 Dec 2020 at 21:20, Owen Thomas <owen.paul.thomas at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Tue., 22 Dec. 2020, 7:47 am Colin Law, <clanlaw at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> On Mon, 21 Dec 2020 at 20:36, Owen Thomas <owen.paul.thomas at gmail.com> wrote:
>> >
>> > Shouldn't Ubuntu automatically support touchpad disablement like any other self respecting OS?
>>
>> It does, it is, oddly enough, in Settings > Mouse & Touchpad, but I
>> thought you wanted to enable/disable it with hotkeys or a switch or
>> something like that rather than the trouble of going into the
>> settings.
>
>
> Is that always true? Perhaps I'm wrong again, but I thought I checked fairly comprehensively on my old Latitude E5570 (I had the thing for at least five years), but couldn't locate the feature.

I think there may have been a period when it was missing, but it is
certainly there on my Fujitsu Lifebook running 20.04.

> However, yes, a mere hotkey to toggle would be a good solution because the navigation you describe is tedious - especially when the touchpad is disabled and one only has the keyboard to navigate. Perhaps Windows indeed has a similar problem although I probably should claim ignorance of Windows whenever I make statements about that OS;  I haven't used it in more than a decade.

As I mentioned above, if you hit the Super key and type
touch
it takes you straight to that dialog.  However, I have to admit that
if the touchpad is disabled and you don't have a mouse plugged in then
I can't actually work out how to use the keyboard to navigate to the
Touchpad enable switch, which is a bit of a bummer.

Colin