You Can Use Flags to Disable the Touchscreen on a Chromebook

Chromebooks come in different form factors, from gaming-focused machines to models with a detachable keyboard that are basically like Surface Pro powered by the ChromeOS. In fact, more Chromebooks are now coming with touchscreen capabilities, but if you’re someone who doesn’t see the value if having a touchscreen on your laptop, you can disable the functionality—you’ll just need to employ a workaround to do it.

How to disable the touchscreen on a Chromebook

To disable the touchscreen on your Chromebook, you’ll need to delve into Chrome flags. First, open up Google Chrome on your Chromebook and type chrome://flags in the search bar and press enter. This will bring you to the Chrome Flags menu, which has its own search box.

In the search box, type debugging keyboard shortcuts. The option will currently show as disabled; click on the dropdown menu and switch it to Enabled. You’ll then be asked to restart Chrome or your Chromebook using a blue Restart button on the screen.

After you’ve restarted your Chromebook, you can now use keyboard shortcuts to disable the touchscreen. Hit Search + Shift + T on your keyboard to enable/disable the touchscreen. The Search key on Chromebooks is usually located where you’d find the Caps lock key on a Windows laptop (i.e. on the left side of the keyboard) and will typically have a magnifying glass icon on it. You can disable and reenable your touchscreen whenever you want using this command.