spacefn disables laptop touchpad

[maciejmotyka]

Problem: cannot control pointer using touchpad when spacefn is active. Trackpoint works fine. Confirmed using fresh build of latest commit (0cbcf0d) on Lenovo T480s w. Ubuntu 20.04 and Dell Latitude 5570 w. Ubuntu 18.04.

Backstory: I didn't notice it before, because I use trackpoint instead of touchpad on my Thinkpad. Recently I installed spacefn on Dell laptop which has a terrible trackpoint so I wanted to use the touchpad, but it didn't move the pointer.

More details:

• When checked with evtest the keyboard streams that I'm feeding to spacefn don't register events from the touchpad, so it's not the case that spacefn is supressing them as it did for external keyboards #2
• When the repeated return code is sent at spacefn startup (#3) touchpad operates normally. As soon as I press space to stop the repeated return code the touchpad no longer moves the pointer.

Unlike #2 this time I don't have any idea why it's happening. Can you reproduce?

[maciejmotyka]

I discovered a hack to get the touchpad working. I don't know why it works, though.

It might be related to the i3 window manager. I am using Ubuntu MATE 20.04 with i3 as a window manager on Lenovo and Ubuntu 18.04 with Regolith desktop (which is based on i3) on Dell.

I can make the touchpad work again by using the dmenu launcher to switch between any GUI application windows, (strangely, switching between terminal emulator windows doesn't unlock the touchpad), or using dmenu to launch a new (non-terminal) window.

I check if this issue occurs in other desktop environments and report here soon.