Laptop – Touchpad tap to click

If you have installed OpenBSD on a laptop, you probably want the touchpad to work right. I expect to be able to click when I tap on the touchpad instead of having to press one of the buttons bellow it. To enable this feature, use wsconsctl.

To list current settings, type doas wsconsctl, which will show you all current settings controlled by wsconsctl.

keyboard.type=pc-xt
keyboard.bell.pitch=400
keyboard.bell.period=100
...
...
...
...
mouse.type=synaptics
mouse.rawmode=0
...
...

We need to create a wsconsctl configuration file, so that the settings persist across reboots. There's an example configuration file located in /etc/examples/wsconsctl.conf. Conveniently, touchpad tapping is already as one of the examples.

# wscons configurable parameters
#
#keyboard.repeat.dell=200	# change keyboard repeat/delay
...
...
...
#mouse.tp.tapping=1			# enable tapping with default button mappings;
							# for customized mappings, list 3 button codes

You can either copy this file to /etc/wsconsctl.conf and remove the lines you don't want there or create /etc/wsconsctl.conf from scratch and only add the mouse tapping line:

$ doas touch /etc/wsconsctl.conf

/etc/wsconsctl.conf

mouse.tp.tapping=1

Now reboot and it should be enabled.