phoon / gestures

Fast touchpad gesture tool

This fork repo mainly focus on the performance of three-figure-dragging feature.

for more tech details, please vist this discussion: riley-martin#6

My own compiled binaries and configuration can be found at https://github.com/ferstar/gestures/releases

NOTE: ONLY WORKS ON X11, NO WAYLAND SUPPORT YET! Now support both Xorg and Wayland(with the help of ydotool power)

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Gestures

About

This is a program for intercepting touchpad gestures and executing commands based on them. Unlike some alternatives, it directly uses the libinput api rather than parsing the output of libinput debug-events.

Features

gestures is able to handle libinput swipe events; not only vertical and horizontal but diagonal as well.

• Handle libinput events
  • Swipe events; vertical, horizontal and diagonal
  • Pinch events
  • Hold events
  • Rotate events
  • Continuous and one-shot events
• Config file

Configuration

See config.md for configuration instructions.

Installation

Platforms

Linux. The testing workflow runs on Ubuntu and I test it myself on Arch Linux, but it should work on any distro if it uses the libinput touchpad driver rather than the older synaptics driver.
Note: If your DE/WM has its own touchpad gestures system, it will most likely need to be disabled to prevent conflicts.

Dependencies

You may need to install libudev and libinput, or their equivalant for your distro, and possibly the dev versions as well.

With Cargo

If you have cargo installed, simply use cargo install gestures

Manual installation

• Clone the repo

  • git clone https://github.com/riley-martin/gestures && cd gestures

• Build

  • cargo build --release

• Copy ./target/release/gestures to a convenient place and execute it

Autostart

Systemd

Drop examples/gestures.service into ~/.config/systemd/user/gestures.service and modify it for your system (mainly the "$HOME" environment variable and the ExecStart will need changed). To have it start automatically, run systemctl --user enable --now gestures.service.

Other init systems

I haven't used any other init systems, but the service is quite simple so it should be easy to modify for other systems.

Alternatives

Here are some alternatives that may suit your use case better, as well as the reasons I don't use them.

• libinput-gestures
  Parses libinput debug-events rather than using libinput api, which is less memory and cpu efficient
• gebaar Not maintained, only supports swipe gestures
• gebaar-libinput-fork Fork of gebaar which supports other gestures, but is also not actively developed
• fusuma Also parses libinput debug-events output