My daily driver is a dell latitude with a touch screen. That touch screen does come in handy but its a real pain when my now 3 year old kiddo decides to touch Dad’s screen. In case you happen to be in the same position, here’s a solution for that.

I have a .bash_aliases file with the following:

alias nopokeme='/usr/bin/xinput disable "ELAN900C:00 04F3:2856"'

alias okpokeme='/usr/bin/xinput enable "ELAN900C:00 04F3:2856"'

The idea being… if I’m working from home and tiny tot is around, a quick ‘nopokeme’ in a terminal will disable the touch input until restart or ‘okpokeme’ will re-enable the input method.

The trick is discovering which input this is.
“xinput list” will show all managed inputs.

Which I will admit was pretty fun when she came over and with a mischievous grin, touched the screen and then didn’t get the usual reaction. Just a smile from Daddy. So she pushed the only glowing button on the keyboard… the power button… moving to the standup desk. Thankfully she’s too short to reach.. for now.