Show HN: A simple GUI app to make Linux touchpad gestures easier | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: A simple GUI app to make Linux touchpad gestures easier

gitlab.com

82 pointscunidev28 comments

I was hoping to see MacOS style three-finger drag being available through this. Unfortunately, it will technically most certainly not be possible to augment it this way, and the maintainer of libinput considers three-finger drag as a luxury that will introduce unnecessary overhead and complexity.

Three-finger drag is IMO one of the most helpful usability features of MacOS, and I miss it dearly every day since I bought my XPS 13.

Edit: ... which is not the fault of the developer of this tool. Good job, I like the spirit and think this is incredibly useful and powerful.

The tool could further make configuration of the most common use cases simpler IMO. Not every user is keen or able to enter the specific commands.

Thanks! I'm also on an XPS 13, and also an ex-Mac user who misses the trackpad stuff, so I know how you feel. Not only knowing commands but especially playing with dbus is unfortunately something for very advanced users only, so my idea was to build some sort of "DB" for common dbus commands that act on DEs, say, to open Budgie Desktop's notifications menu, plus an assisted GUI configuration that generates commands for keyboard shortcuts (xdotool or something), workspace actions (move, add...) and an "Open app" selection dialog. That's gonna take a long while though :(

> so my idea was to build some sort of "DB" for common dbus commands that act on DEs

This is great, where is the information you currently have and how can I contribute? I find that DB to be pretty important for this tool.

That's just an idea for future releases, though it needs a much wider user base to make any sense...

I've created something temporary here, feel free to add anything :)

https://gitlab.com/cunidev/gestures/wikis/desktop-specific-c...

As silly as it may sound, three-finger drag is the primary reason why I will likely be purchasing a MacBook Pro instead of a Surface Book as my next laptop.

Nice. However the biggest limitation (which is no fault of this app) is that the gestures simply trigger commands upon their completion, with no intermediate feedback. What would it take to implement animations that follow gestures in progress like how macOS's change workspace animation continuously tracks one's fingers during the swipe?

Heh, a way larger work that any tool of this kind currently on Linux, implemented directly from the Linux desktop developers. I can see the problem though, would love to see better upstream support for touchpad gestures myself.

I have been thinking about this as well and believe that the only way to get this is the desktop environment implementing this. However I think there might be some space for a library here, or maybe a common API.

I haven't tried it yet myself but it seems that in GNOME 3 there is an animation for the workspace touchpad gesture.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/gnome/comments/9hsw0p/nice_touchpad...

Wasn't aware of this, thanks for reporting! I wonder why they didn't put this in their official 3.30 changelog, it's quite a big change. I seriously doubt this will be exposed through dbus or anyhow customizable, but it's a huge step forward anyway.

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/commit/ebe6f59d7e...

Haven’t tried this yet (am away). But it looks like just what I have been looking for, thanks!

You're welcome! As it's still quite new, you'll need to install it manually in most distros given that it's only present in Solus official repos ATM, and Flatpak/Snap sandboxing would probably not allow even its most basic usage. If some Arch user managed to add it to the AUR that'd likely help, now the install process has to be done from terminal which, though common with Linux software and just a copy-paste from the Gitlab page, isn't exactly what a "newbie" would love.

I second this, kudos for the app!

if it hasn't been added to the AUR by the time my wife gets home and can watch the children I get it added.

It'd be awesome!

I'm not sure about FlatPaks, but at least Snaps have a "classic" confinement mode which removes all restrictions: https://docs.snapcraft.io/reference/confinement

(Also: a Snap would be great!)

Good to hear, thanks!

Can you explain a little bit more about this? This allows me to add arbitrary gestures (within the confines of swipe/pinch, 2/3/4 fingers etc) that trigger command line commands?

Does it work with all touchpads?

What are some commands I might be interested in configuring?

> This allows me to add arbitrary gestures (within the confines of swipe/pinch, 2/3/4 fingers etc) that trigger command line commands?

Exactly.

> Does it work with all touchpads?

All libinput-supported touchpads (see: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Libinput). There's more on this on the GitHub page for libinput-gestures, the CLI tool Gestures is based on: https://github.com/bulletmark/libinput-gestures

> What are some commands I might be interested in configuring?

I'm personally using it to replicate (more or less successfully) the macOS gestures I missed when switching to Linux. For example: - swipe left/right to switch workspace - swipe down to trigger the Budgie Desktop run dialog - swipe left/right to open and close notifications - pinch in/out to zoom in or out (mapping it to the Ctrl/ +- shortcuts) This (5-second) video gives some very basic examples: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SfJ59kTcJjM

Direct keyboard shortcuts aren't unfortunately available in Wayland ATM, given its design limitations for security reasons. Workarounds will come (virtual keyboard drivers perhaps?), but there's nothing like that AFAIK. Luckily, apart from zoom, I was able to do basically anything in Wayland too playing with wmctrl and dbus-send

Edit: formatting

Do most laptops that people currently get to run Linux, like the Dell XPS or the Thinkpad X1 have a touchpad that support multi-finger-gestures that could be configured with this? If I ever were to switch from a MacBook to a Linux machine, I’d definitely be very interested in having the equivalent of BetterTouchTool for custom gestures in applications (assuming the hardware supports it)

Every modern touchpad supports it AFAIK, not sure about the cheap Chinese ones but I got it working on 6/6 of my tested hardware (a Macbook Pro 2013 (?), an old Macbook 2009 white, my XPS 13 2018, an ASUS with a somewhat bad supported "ELAN" touchpad, a Dell XPS 15 2017 and a Lenovo Thinkpad)

Thanks! That’s good to know!

Wayland isn't even a product it's a protocol. You will have to ask each individual project for every feature that is presently missing and will probably end with only a subset of the presently missing features 5 years from now.

You will pick from 4-8 environments instead of 40. It will be impossible to mix and match any component that transgresses boundaries like workspace bars or gesture apps, screenshot apps, screencast apps, keybinding apps.

You will have the same zero malware incidents you had this year but with less useful features. It will be handy that you can mix and match different dpi display for a few years until all your stuff is 4K anyway.

This may have been a lot easier using Jupyter widgets. Or Bokeh. Or Kivy.

In the future I hope we will get some kind of usable Python runtime for Webassembly, implementing or interfacing to something like React or vuejs.

But currently that kind of runtime would be a rather big download...

what (would have been easier?)

Making a simple GUI which updates dynamically. Either in the browser through jupyter widgets and/or Bokeh plotting, or everywhere else through kivy.

I like Kivy. Jupyter is nice. But ... why would you ever use either for an app a goal of which is to feel native to the GNOME environment, that doesn't need to be cross-platform or do any 'dynamic updating' and does need access to system APIs?

???

At first I thought you were a bot making up weird tangentially-related coments through markov chaining or something, after having found your twitter page (good jokes!) I think you have some prety weird ideas or are trolling. Right tool for the job and such.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com