Enabling touchpad tapping in X11 on my Linux laptop

I’ve been using my HP ZBook 15 G5 laptop a lot lately, but it annoyed me that I couldn’t tap the touchpad in i3. It does have physical buttons — but I’m used to tapping on the pad… My laptop is running Arch Linux BTW 😉

Luckily it was really easy to fix 🙂

First I made sure I had the right driver installed:

extra/xf86-input-libinput 1.5.0-1 (xorg-drivers) [installed]
    Generic input driver for the X.Org server based on libinput

Then I created a new file under /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/:

$ cat /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/30-touchpad.conf

Section "InputClass"
    Identifier "touchpad"
    Driver "libinput"
    MatchIsTouchpad "on"
    Option "tapping" "on"
    Option "AccelProfile" "adaptive"
    Option "TappingButtonMap" "lrm"
EndSection

This enabled tapping with the following button map:

• One finger: left mouse button click
• Two fingers: right mouse button click
• Three fingers: scroll wheel click

Source: Reddit post