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Comment by askvictor | Hacker News Reader

Having recently moved back to Linux (PopOS) from Windows, the one biggest annoyance is not being able to configure two-finger touchpad swipe to be browser back/forward. This is the default in Mac, easily configurable in Windows (perhaps it's the default?), and default in ChromeOS. But simply not an option in any Linux I've tried. The Epiphany Browser does it, but that lacks extension support so is a no-go for me. Any extensions or workarounds I've tried only support three-finger swipes.

So, along with consistent keyboard shortcuts, I'd like to add consistent and configurable mouse/trackball actions (some apps scrollwheel goes up/down, others it zooms, some support pinch zoom, some don't).

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Touchpad gestures for Linux apps are being worked on:

- Latest update (December 2021): https://www.gitclear.com/blog/linux_touchpad_update_december...

- HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29555822

So far, pinch-to-zoom has been implemented in Firefox. (If you are using X11 instead of Wayland, then the environment variable MOZ_USE_XINPUT2=1 needs to be set.) Gestures for back/forward navigation have not been implemented yet (Firefox Bugzilla issue: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1539730).

The project aims to support gestures in other Linux apps, too. If you would like to help fund this project, the developer has a GitHub sponsor page here:

https://github.com/sponsors/gitclear

What I don't quite get is why this needs a project; it just needs configuration options; for example, two-finger swipes currently map to mouse buttons (buttons 6 and 7 for left/right swiping) which most apps interpret as scrolling (in every direction). I'm about to write a script to remap those to browser back and browser forward actions (after a delay to prevent repeated actions), but I'm so surprised it's not baked into the desktop environment.

But thanks for the link, I'll check it out

> What I don't quite get is why this needs a project

If this was MacOS, I'd agree. But on Linux, it's a different hardware landscape. There are hundreds of trackpads that Linux is compatible with, but not every one of them is multitouch (or implements multitouch the same way). Gesture support on Linux has been a long time coming, but that's mostly because getting uniform trackpad support over thousands of laptops is just not a very fast process, whereas on MacOS, Apple can make certain assumptions about the hardware it's running.

It’s more about how on MacOS, Apple gets to dictate what signal that gesture is going to send to the applications and you can’t configure it to send anything else. So either the application recognizes that signal and it works for every system, or it doesn’t and it doesn’t work for every system.

This makes it a lot more likely that apps are going to recognize that signal so it works for every system. It’s the paradox of choice.

Not really. On macOS, trackpad swipes produce a series of horizontal scroll events, not a simple back/forward event. An app can do whatever it wants with the scroll events. Safari, when the scroll position is at the end of the horizontal outer edge of the document, does an interactive back/forward animation that tracks your fingers while they remain on the trackpad.

As far as I know you’re supposed to use the NSGestureRecognizer system to recognize this kind of gestures and it’ll automatically make it work like you write. If you try to handle all the events yourself you end up doing a lot of work for probably a worse result.

You are correct.

> On macOS, trackpad swipes produce a series of horizontal scroll events, not a simple back/forward event.

That's not true. On macOS (and also iOS), you subscribe to gesture recognizers (i.e. swipe gestures), not isolated events, which give you easy access to how users interact with macOS without having to analyze (and likely analyze incorrectly) low-level trackpad interaction.

You could always choose to look directly at events instead, but if you are trying to get the behavior of a widely-used gesture like swiping forward/back, you will get much more accuracy (and happiness from users, and less dev time) by just recognizing them at a high level, which is what Apple expects.

As a user interested in three-finger middle-click and not interested in two-finger back swiping I have the exact opposite experience.

In Windows and Linux clicking the trackpad with 3 fingers causes a middle click, in MacOS this is not an option at all. Moreover, enabling it is apparently a project so difficult that the cheapest solution[0] I could find costs €8 just to add middle click functionality, nothing else.

[0]: https://middleclick.app/

and default in ChromeOS. But simply not an option in any Linux I've tried.

Bit of a tangent, but it's always funny to me to discuss ChromeOS and Android as distinct from Linux distributions. I get that they're each practically as "Linux" as TiVo (and might not even be that forever, depending on how Fuscia evolves), but it actually might help avoid confusion if we started using the term GNU/Linux unironically in some contexts.

Because they actually are, the fact that they use the Linux kernel is an implementation detail.

Termux folks keep hitting walls, because they refuse to acknowledge these are the only APIs they are allowed to call.

https://developer.android.com/ndk/guides/stable_apis

So when they make use of other Linux stuff that according to Google are private APIs, things don't go well.

As for ChromeOS, the kernel isn't exposed to userspace in any form, which are basically Webapps.

Running Linux applications on Chrome OS makes use of a secondary distribution in a VM, pretty much similar to how WSL 2 works on Windows.

So they might use the Linux kernel, yet they are far away from being distros that can easily run the GNU stuff.

My annoyance in going to pop from windows is lack of the address bar in the file explorer. I miss the ability to copy/paste file paths there, click up to navigate up the directory structure, drag and drop paths into shortcuts, etc.

Assuming Nautilus, Ctrl+L. I do wish just clicking on it worked though. I'd guess the reason they haven't implemented that is because it's also the window bar, so it's draggable.

Really? You cannot use an exciting OS without pinching movements?

It is not the first time I hear this, so this OSX feature must be truly addictive & productive.

This thread has a special focus on switching the operating system from macOS to Pop_OS. In this context, mentioning missing features between the operating systems is valid.

I don’t really like the snide nature of your comment, people care a lot about things like trackpad functionalities. Objectively, unix has been lacking in this department.

It doesn't necessarily read as snide.

(actually swipe movements, but pinching movements is the same idea)

In my case (and I suspect many others) a case of muscle memory, which can take a while to retrain, so you move to a new OS hoping you can keep the same motions you're used to and just get your work done. It's also important if you regularly have to use multiple OSes (as some tech support people have to do, and when you need to test on different OSes)

For what it's worth I've been using libinput-gestures in combination with xdotool for exactly this purpose, it's been working great for a while.

Will your 10.6 rework include the Display Gamma change that Apple included at release?

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