ThinkPad X1 TrackPoint

I recently ran a system update for Ubuntu on my ThinkPad X1 Carbon (5th-Gen). Afterwards, I noticed the speed of the TrackPoint was really slow. The pointer would barely move! A quick search on the web led to many potential fixes, but none of them worked on my particular setup (Ubuntu 18.04 with Unity).

After trying several solutions, I finally found a working one using xinput commands in ~/.bashrc.

Get TrackPoint Device Name

First, get the name of the device for the TrackPoint using xinput:

xinput | grep Track

The output should look something like:

⎜ ↳ TPPS/2 Elan TrackPoint  id=12   [slave  pointer  (2)]

In my case, the name of the TrackPoint device is "TPPS/2 Elan TrackPoint".

Set the TrackPoint Speed

Using the name of the device, add the following lines to ~/.bashrc:

xinput --set-prop "TPPS/2 Elan TrackPoint" "libinput Accel Profile Enabled" 1, 0
xinput --set-prop "TPPS/2 Elan TrackPoint" "libinput Accel Speed" 0.8

The second line is what sets the speed. It can be set to any value between 0.0 and 1.0. The higher the number, the faster the TrackPoint speed.

(Optional) Prevent tmux from Resetting the Speed

In tmux, I noticed every time a new pane was opened, the TrackPoint speed would slow back down. This is because tmux spins up a different login shell, using .bash_profile to load the settings. So, the commands in .bashrc are never picked up.

To fix this, just create ~/.bash_profile and add:

source ~/.bashrc

Now, with every new tmux pane, the TrackPoint speed is preserved!

Questions? Comments? Corrections? Leave me a comment. Cheers!