For some awful reason, palm detect is off by default, even though it appears to be on in the system settings.  The problem occurs while I’m typing lots of code, or responding to an email.  I’ll be typing along. not paying close attention to where my cursor is.  All of a sudden, everything I just typed, highlights in the midst of me typing, and disappears because my cursor just selected everything and erased it.

After weeks of trying different start up scripts, and changing different settings, I think I have finally come to a conclusion on this issue.  Here are the steps I took to fix this:

First you need to figure out what type of touch pad device you are using according to xinput.  This is done by running:

xinput list

Look for the keyword ‘touchpad’.

Copy the entire text with the word touchpad in it.  This is the name of your touchpad device, as far as Ubuntu is concerned.
Make note of the ‘id’

Now list the properties of your touchpad with the command:

xinput list-props [touchpad name]
xinput list-props {id}

You’re looking for 2 lines here,  Palm Detection and Palm Dimensions.  As you can see, my Palm Detection is already set to 1, and Palm Dimensions are already set to small numbers.  These are the things you’re looking to change.

To change these settings, you want to type into terminal:

xinput set-prop "[device name]" "Synaptics Palm Detection" 1
xinput set-prop {id} "Synaptics Palm Detection" 1

xinput set-prop "{id}" "Synaptics Palm Dimensions" 5, 5

Obviously, replace the [device name] with you’re specific device name, and also replace “Synaptics Palm Dimensions” with whatever is in your terminal.  Mine was defaulted at 10, 100 for palm dimensions, which wasn’t even close to right.  You’re going to want to keep running setting the palm dimensions until you find something that works for your specific touchpad.

You’re almost done.  Once you find the settings that work for you, you’re going to want to save these settings so they don’t get reset to what they were before on your next restart.  This is done by opening your Dash menu (super button).  Type: Start, and click Startup Applications.

Once you have this window open, click Add.

You can set the name to be whatever you’d like.  I’d suggest making it simple so you remember what that command is.  In the command box, you paste your command that you have found works for your palm detect.  You’ll want to do this for Palm Detect and for Palm Dimensions.

Now restart your computer and test.  You can see if the changes took by running the xinput list-props [device] command again and seeing if your new settings are there.

I hope this helps you, please comment where it does or not.