Disabling Wacom Bamboo touch in Linux

I use a Wacom Bamboo Pen & Touch with Skritter to practice Chinese characters, and would strongly recommend this combination for anyone studying Chinese or Japanese.

However, I find that I never use the tablet’s touch functionality, and that it’s actually quite annoying as I keep accidentally touching it and causing various problems.

To disable the touch functionality in Windows or Mac is very easy as there’s a settings GUI included with the drivers. On Linux, you need to get terminal open. The first command you want is:

xsetwacom –list devices

This will produce a list of Wacom devices currently detected, so you can get the ID for the touch functionality. The list will look something like this:

Wacom BambooPT 2FG 4x5 Pen eraser    id: 9    type: ERASER Wacom BambooPT 2FG 4x5 Pen stylus    id: 10    type: STYLUS Wacom BambooPT 2FG 4x5 Finger pad    id: 11    type: PAD Wacom BambooPT 2FG 4x5 Finger touch    id: 12    type: TOUCH

The one you want is “type: TOUCH”. In my case the ID is 12. Then type the following command to switch off touch:

xsetwacom set _12_ touch off

Replace the ID 12 with whatever ID number you get from your list of devices.

If you want to switch touch back on again, the command is simply:

xsetwacom set _12_ touch on