Disable touchpad

Today's mission has been to effectively disable the touchpa on the xps so I can take a more keyboard-driven approach and type in an uninhibited manner without weird annoying shit happening all the time.

Long story short, the best way of doing this is with synclient:

> synclient TouchpadOff=1

to disable the touchpad and, unsurprisingly

> synclient TouchpadOff=0

to enable it again.

Now, I can't rely on always being able to remember that stuff in however many month's time I need it again, so I've aliased the commands "ontouchpad" and "offtouchpad" to the relevent instructions.

this equates to "on" and "off" when autocomplete is used via TAB.

FURTHERmore, I have set Fn+F8 to synclient TouchpadOff=1 so I can quickly deactivate the pad in the heat of the moment. I tried a couple of scripts I found online to toggle the touchpad, but they didn't work for some reasons I didn't prioritise identifying.

so, FYI my .bashrc has the following lines added (with lots of not-really-necessary quotes and \ escape characters included. I like to echo what's happening in case I get used to the commands and start to think they're part of the built-in shell set!):

    alias unzip="echo '\"unzip\" aliased to: \"7za x\"';7za x"

    alias ontouchpad="echo '\"ontouchpad\" aliased to: \"synclient TouchpadOff=0\" - TOUCHPAD IS NOW ENABLED';synclient TouchpadOff=0"

    alias offtouchpad="echo '\"offtouchpad\" aliased to: \"synclient TouchpadOff=1\" - TOUCHPAD IS NOW DISABLED';synclient TouchpadOff=1" 

Bonus learnings:

http://wiki.bash-hackers.org/syntax/quoting#strong_quoting

inside a single quote nothing is interpreted.

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