A Fix for Slow TrackPoint Speed in Ubuntu 18.04 (Unity) on ThinkPad
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!