Temporarily disable touchpad while typing

In linux if you have a laptop with a trackpad just below the keyboard, sometimes while typing you’ll brush the pad and the cursor jumps — you stop typing, put the cursor back, repeat. Sensitive touchpads make this even worse.

On modern distros (libinput) — most current Linux installs use the libinput driver, which has disable-while-typing built in and often on by default. On GNOME you can toggle and tune it at Settings → Mouse & Touchpad, or from the shell:

gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.peripherals.touchpad disable-while-typing true

KDE exposes the same setting in System Settings → Input Devices → Touchpad. If it’s already doing the right thing you can stop here.

On older X11 / Synaptics setups — if your machine is on the legacy Synaptics X11 driver (roughly anything pre-18.04, or modern systems where you’ve explicitly switched back), the classic fix is syndaemon:

syndaemon -d -t -i 1

The -i 1 is the idle delay in seconds and can be adjusted. Make it run at login by adding it under Preferences → Sessions (or your desktop’s equivalent auto-start settings).