libinput-mea...-touchpad-tap(1)

✨ NAME ✨

Okay bestie, welcome to the libinput Manual 💖. This page is for libinput-measure-touchpad-tap — measure tap-to-click properties of devices. The header up top gets truncated to libinput-mea...-touchpad-tap(1), which is giving “my name is too long for this terminal” energy, but now we know the full name. 🫶

🦋 SYNOPSIS 🦋

libinput measure touchpad-tap [--help] [--format=<format>]
[/dev/input/event0]

💖 DESCRIPTION 💖

So the libinput measure touchpad-tap tool measures properties of the tap-to-click behavior of the user. Yes, the user — that’s you, bestie. It’s an interactive tool ✨. When you execute it, it will prompt you to interact with the touchpad. On termination, it prints a summary of the tap interactions seen. Attach that data to any tap-related bug report, okay? It’s literally the receipts. 🧾💅

For a full description of how libinput’s tap-to-click behavior works, peep the online documentation here: https://wayland.freedesktop.org/libinput/doc/latest/tapping.html. Go read it if you want the deep lore. 👑

This is a debugging tool only, and its output may change at any time. Do not rely on the output — it’s giving temporary, not permanent. 😭

This tool usually needs to be run as root to have access to the /dev/input/eventX nodes. Root access, the eternal accessory. 🔑

💅 OPTIONS 💅

If a device node is given, this tool opens that device node. Otherwise, this tool searches for the first node that looks like a touchpad and uses that node. Simple as that, no cap. 🎀

• --help — print help. That’s it, that’s the whole flag. Slay.
• --format=summary|dat — specify the data format to be printed. The default (or if --format is omitted) is "summary". See the DATA FORMATS section below, bestie. 💖

🌈 DATA FORMATS 🌈

This section describes the data formats printed with the --format commandline argument. Note that any of the output may change at any time — yes, even the cute parts. 😭

🌸 summary 🌸

The summary format prints a summary of the data collected. This format is useful to get a quick overview of a user’s tapping behavior and why some taps may or may not be detected. It’s the “so what happened?” format, and I’m obsessed. ✨

🦋 dat 🦋

The dat format prints the touch sequence data (raw and processed) in column-style format, suitable for processing by other tools such as gnuplot(1). The data is aligned in one row per touch with each column containing a separate data entry. libinput-measure-touchpad-tap prints comments at the top of the file to describe each column — thoughtful queen behavior. 👑

WARNING: The data contained in the output is grouped by different sort orders. For example, the first few columns may list tap information in the 'natural' sort order (i.e. as they occurred), the data in the next few columns may list tap information sorted by the delta time between touch down and touch up. Comparing columns across these group boundaries will compare data of two different touch points and result in invalid analysis. Do not do it, bestie. That comparison is not giving what you think it’s giving. 💀

💀 BUGS 💀

This tool does not take finger pressure into account. The tap it detects may be different to those detected by libinput if libinput's pressure thresholds differ significantly to the kernel’s pressure thresholds. So yeah, pressure is the plot twist. 😭

👑 LIBINPUT 👑

Part of the libinput(1) suite. You already know. 💜

---

Okay, that’s the page, bestie 🫶 — the footer’s source/version is libinput 1.32.0, and it signs off with libinput-mea...-touchpad-tap(1). No date printed in this footer, so no fake date from me, periodt. 💅✨