Keyboard Cursor Jumps While Typing
 

I thought I was imagining things for the last few days but last night I was working on a python script and now I'm absolutely sure the issue is real.

I'm using KDE 4.6.5 from KTown on slackware 13.37 on a new Dell Inspiron 15R Laptop. Any time I am typing in a textbox control, the cursor will jump up and or back at random (seemingly) to a new position and this garbles up my text real bad. I am having to type, really, really slowly to prevent the cursor from jumping to a new position and screwing up my work.

I think I resolved the issue by disabling the keystroke repeat option in KDE but then I can't hold up to go up more than one line, hold enter to go down more than one line, etc, etc. Disabling the keystroke repeat basically makes the computer useless for anything other than web surfing.

Does anyone have any idea how to resolve this or am I just crazy?

keyboard error? glass of cafe?

Could you be catching the touchpad whilst typing? I know a combination of that and catching the menu key causes me to select and delete text when I first move to some latptops.

That's what I originally thought, I must be hitting the touchpad but no it's been going on all week. If I type like a leper with my hands arched upwards to I'm nowhere near the touchpad it still jumps like that. I don't know, maybe there's some kind of hotkey shortcut or something that I'm hitting when I type that jumps me around.

I need to boot into Windows 7, load Visual Studio and try working on some code and see if it happens there too. If not then I can be 100% sure it's a slackware/kde thing.

Don't know if this will help but I have much the same problem and have solved it using syndaemon. I put a script in ~/.kde/Autostart that reads:

#!/bin/bash

/usr/bin/syndaemon -d -i20

The '-d' is to run as a daemon process and the '-i20' tells syndaemon to turn off the touchpad for 20 seconds after a key has been typed. 20 seconds is probably overkill and could be reduced to something more reasonable.

Brilliant! I'll give that a try after work tonight!

I gave that command a try and the stdout was: Unable to find a synaptics device.