Hey, Thanks for sharing this! Dealing with palm-press trackpad jumps on a ThinkPad is incredibly annoying, so this is definitely a welcome for anyone running NetBSD on a laptop.
The finger_high sysctl trick is a pretty clever workaround to bypass the driver interpretation entirely. One quick question on how you're handling it: since writing to sysctl knobs usually requires root, does the daemon have to run with elevated privileges? Running an X-centric tool as root can be a bit sketchy security-wise, so I'm curious if you've looked into separating the X11 listener from the actual sysctl call, or using a small suid helper. Also, out of curiosity, did you run into issues trying to use user-space tools like xinput or wsconsctl to toggle the device? I know if you're using the generic wscons driver it tends to multiplex everything into one stream, which makes isolating just the trackpad a massive pain—assuming that's why you went the kernel route. Either way, nice work getting this up. Cheers, Aryabhata On Tue, 26 May, 2026, 3:43 am thezerobit, <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi, > I hacked syndaemon to work on NetBSD. Codeberg page: > https://codeberg.org/thezerobit/syndaemon-netbsd . Direct download: > https://codeberg.org/thezerobit/syndaemon-netbsd/archive/main.tar.gz > > If you don't know what syndaemon is, it's a little daemon that pays > attention to keyboard activity in X and disables the trackpad while you > are typing. This is to prevent unintentional mouse movements and clicks > on laptop trackpads located just below the keyboard. This is pretty much > essential when working on my Thinkpad T580. There is a README.txt in the > repo which explains how to compile and use the tool. > > The reason this is a bit of a hack is that the only way to safely > disable the trackpad that I could find was to set the sysctl variable > "hw.synaptics.finger_high" to a high enough value that the driver no > longer registers interaction. Feel free to contact me directly with > feedback or suggestions on how to improve it or if you need help getting > it working. > > -thezerobit >
