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Comment by defnotashton2 | Hacker News Reader

Have yet to see a non Mac track pad that has more than two gestures..

If you use Wayland (which... has its issues, but maybe they're better now?) on an XPS 13 Developer Edition... or even my junk Chromebook with MrChromebox's firmware installed so I can install Linux, you can get all sorts of gestures that are more than just "two gestures." Heck, even Windows supports gestures just fine. So...

I have yet to encounter any non-Mac trackpad gestures that don't feel cheap, laggy, and/or too unreliable to bother committing to muscle memory. Apple's trackpad haptics and OS-level gesture support are second to none.

then use keyboard combinations. they are faster and much more reliable. I am using a wayland window manager called sway, and while im pretty sure you can do everything with a mouse, you can configure it to do a lot of things with the keyboard. for example, I found the three-finger-tap which is used for copying and pasting was too difficult and slow, so i just bound it to mod+c and mod+v

I was gonna reply with this as well, but you just about nailed it. When my hands are almost 99% on the keyboard (especially when programming, or even while browsing the internet), why should I bother moving my hands back to the mouse when I can just use my comfortable and reliable keyboard?

Try fusuma (gem install fusuma, may need user adding to input group to run, or run it with sudo).

Gestures on trackpad for recent (libinput) Linux. It runs xdotool to stuff the keyboard buffer with keystrokes when it sees certain gestures. E.g. three finger swipe left and right do Alt-Left and Alt-Right, which have the effect of Back and Forward in the browser and some other browsing apps (e.g. IntelliJ). Four-finger swipe left and right switches desktop on my machine. It's one more finger than Mac but probably required not to conflict with two finger scroll.

Trackpad gestures are not the same as a keyboard shortcut. A shortcut runs one command as a discrete event, whereas a gesture is continuous e.g. what % zoom did your pinch gesture represent.

Eh. That's not what I understand by gestures. Mouse gestures - they're also a thing - generally use a sequence of orthogonal mouse movements for a single command. Most Mac gestures are discrete, not continuous. Pinch to zoom is in the minority, and is more like a multitouch input than a gesture per se. Phone gestures too are generally discrete; the exceptions are zooming and rotating, and rotating is sufficiently fiddly it isn't seen much outside map apps.

> Mac gestures are discrete, not continuous

Continuous: pinch zoom, rotate, swipe between pages, swipe between virtual desktops, swipe between fullscreen apps, show notification center, show all windows on current desktop ("Mission Control"), show all application windows ("App Exposé"), show Launchpad, show desktop

Discrete: browser back/forward I guess?

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