Fix Trackpad Not Working Mac. Well, till now you have seen the methods which help if macbook not working. Now let us discuss trackpad not working mac issue in clear and understandable format. When will you get to know about the issue? Yes, you will know it is affected at the time of using three finger drag. As such won’t function reliably. 2 Why does my trackpad click not work? 3 How do I fix a trackpad stuck in clicked mode? 3.1 Step 1: Restart your computer and trackpad; 3.2 Step 2: Reset the PRAM and NVRAM on your Mac; 3.3 Step 3: Reset the SMC on your Mac; 3.4 Step 4: Change your trackpad preferences; 3.5 Step 5: Update or remove third-party drivers; 3.6 Step 6: Reinstall macOS.
- Macbook Pro 2017 Touchpad Not Clicking Working
- Macbook Pro Touchpad Not Clicking
- Macbook Touchpad Not Working
- Macbook Pro Touchpad Driver
Update: After continuing to use my system, I opted for the Synaptics driver instead. Learn why in my follow-up.
Macbook Pro 2017 Touchpad Not Clicking Working
As a longtime Macbook Pro user, I’ve grown an insatiable appetite for exceptional hardware+software implementations of laptop functionality like suspend/wake, bluetooth, wifi, and touchpad. If there’s anything that my past Linux laptops taught me, it’s that these functions are not automatically perfect [insert shock here]. They seem easy & perfect only when they work flawlessly, and they work flawlessly only because Apple employs large teams of experts to test & polish the hardware/software interplay on a Macbook such that it feels perfect.
Since Apple gave me and the rest of the Developer community the heave-ho with its decisions on the latest generation of Macbook Pro [1], it has been a long & harsh journey toward getting a laptop experience that feels as flawless as my Macbook Pro did. But after weeks of experimentation, I wanted to share my current touchpad setup, which feels like it is approaching the buttery smoothness of my past Macbook Pros.
Macbook Pro Touchpad Not Clicking
There are twogood articles on setting up a touchpad with Linux (Arch, Antergos, Debian, Ubuntu et al). As these articles explain it, there are three touchpad drivers available on Linux: synaptics (no longer supported), libinput, and mtrack. Preferring to avoid starting with abandonware, I narrowed my search down to libinput and mtrack. The choice between these options was made easier by reading the libinput philosophy not to implement features that aren’t likely to be needed by mainstream users. In their words: “In the old synaptics driver, we added options whenever something new came up and we tried to make those options generic. This was a big mistake… we’re having none of that” Practically speaking, this means that the limit of configurability in libinput is far more limited than the 1,001 settings offered by mtrack.
This isn’t to say that mtrack is a flawless choice. This is not a driver being supported and tested by teams of users & experts. It has no visual settings panel that I’m aware of, all configuration is done via text file. And the correct version to install is initially ambiguous. The officially developed version hasn’t been advanced since 2015, so a popular fork has taken up the torch in recent years. This is why Dayne’s Medium Post recommends installing directly via git. And I recommend the same.
Installing mtrack
Here are the basics to get the latest mtrack installed on your system:
At this point you’ll have mtrack’s driver files built/installed, but Xorg still calls the shots in enabling it vs other drivers. By default, mtrack’s xorg configuration file gets placed in
/usr/shared/X11/xorg.conf.d/50-mtrack.conf
, which in my case meant its precedence was lower than both synaptics (placed in /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d
, which takes precedence over the /usr/shared/X11/xorg.conf.d
directory) and libinput (which initially had an alphanumerically lower file name (40-libinput.conf
) than 50-mtrack.conf
. To fix these issues, your best bet is to move your mtrack.conf file to a location/filename with higher precedence: Targus docking station macbook pro.Once you’ve done these steps, mtrack should become your default touchpad driver after restarting X server. Of course, this being Linux, there is no single answer as to most easily restart X server. These people think that you can simply run startx, but that didn’t work for me without sudo, and when I ran it with sudo, I ended up setting root permissions on a file (
~/.Xauthority
) that prevented me from logging in. This well-rated response thinks you can sudo restart lightdm, which did work for me (albeit with different syntax since I’m on arch), but still ended up logging me out, so my official recommendation for re-starting X server is unfortunately to log out then log back in. At that point, if you run cat /var/log/Xorg.0.log | grep mtrack
you should see a series of messages that show mtrack being loaded. If you don’t, this was the best thread I found for diagnosing what input driver is actually being used. If you find anything interesting, please do post it to the comments.Crafting the dream touchpad experience
Once you get mtrack functional, then begins the process of creating a configuration file that best approximates Macbook Pro settings. Here is my annotated config file:
Macbook Touchpad Not Working
In a more perfect world, Wordpest wouldn’t have removed the indentation in that block. It is not the world in which we live.
![Touchpad Touchpad](https://photos5.appleinsider.com/gallery/26485-37915-MacBook-Pro-TouchPad-xl.jpg)
Future improvements
Compared to the miserable touchpad experience I had endured with synaptics and libinput, it has been delightful to get reliable two-finger scrolling that coasts, and to get my two-finger scroll speed comparable to what feels normal from my time in OS X. Still on my list to try to improve the configuration as I move forward:
Macbook Pro Touchpad Driver
- Fix the couple pixels that touchpad tends to stray when I am setting down my thumb in an attempt to click (classic Linux touchpad annoyance)
- When beginning a new scroll action while coast is active, scroll occurs at 10x normal speed
- Setup two-finger scrolling to work as smoothly as OS X, rather than scrolling the page in small, discrete increments
- Determine if it’s somehow possible to restart X server without getting logged out (unlikely, given how much Googling I’ve done on this topic)
Footnotes
[1] While the touch bar is as bad for programming as numerous developers predicted, it was minuscule amount key travel inherent in their butterfly keys that served as my breaking point. Honorable mentions to the laptop hard crashing every few days, and the touchpad that is so impossibly large as to occasionally pick up spurious input (although their software integration makes that problem occur a fraction as often as it would for a comparable Linux laptop)
[1] While the touch bar is as bad for programming as numerous developers predicted, it was minuscule amount key travel inherent in their butterfly keys that served as my breaking point. Honorable mentions to the laptop hard crashing every few days, and the touchpad that is so impossibly large as to occasionally pick up spurious input (although their software integration makes that problem occur a fraction as often as it would for a comparable Linux laptop)