How can I temporarily disable my laptop’s built-in keyboard? reddit / freebsd ---------------------------------------------------------------------- gplusplus314 · 2023-03-15 02:41 I use external, ergonomic keyboards exclusively. I regularly just place my keyboards directly on top of my laptop’s keyboard and just disable the built-in keyboard. In Linux, I do this by running KMonad and I have a key binding to switch the laptop’s keyboard to essentially an opaque layer of “do nothing.” On macOS, Karabiner Elements can automagically disable the built-in keyboard when my custom keyboard is connected. I like to use my trusty ThinkPad T520 for Linux distro hopping and other random experiments. Right now, I’m running GhostBSD as an easy- mode FreeBSD installation while I get used to the platform. One thing that is killing me is that I can’t figure out how to disable the built in keyboard. It doesn’t have to be automatic, I just want to be able to temporarily make it do nothing if keys are pressed. I’ve searched in the usual places and I’m coming up short. I’m still new to BSD in general, so your patience is appreciated. Thank you! ---------------------------------------------------------------------- frenchiephish · 2023-03-15 06:14 I'm fairly certain You should be able to do this with `xinput`. Find the device id with `xinput --list` then `xinput --disable ` and `--enable ` . This will only disable the input into X11. If you drop to a console then both keyboards will be active. Likewise, keystrokes that are intercepted by the kernel will still be active. That said, it should get the job done for your needs. I've not tried this under X11 on FreeBSD, but I do use it to disable my laptop's touch screen under Linux and I'm 99% sure it's an X11 function rather than anything OS specific ---------------------------------------------------------------------- oh5nxo · 2023-03-15 06:40 Check out https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?kbdcontrol ---------------------------------------------------------------------- gplusplus314 · 2023-03-15 20:19 I plan on using Wayland, not X11. Any idea what I could do for that? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- gplusplus314 · 2023-03-15 20:25 This looks promising. I’ll report back when I tinker with it. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- frenchiephish · 2023-03-20 02:45 I had a good look at this and Wayland looks significantly harder to solve. It looks possible with config file editing and restarting a session, but that's less than ideal. That said, I would probably still suggest X11 over Wayland, particularly on BSD. Thats primarily because Wayland development is heavily focused on Linux at the exclusion of all others see the Difficulties section of: https://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/wayland_on_netbsd_trials_and. It's likely to work, but the experience is likely to be less good than what you'd get with X11. Yes Wayland fixes some X11 issues, but it drags in a whole lot of its own problems at the same time. That's the case with Linux too, but at least you're in the group being developed for in that case.