Touchpad Gestures

A bunch of powerful touchpad gestures for Linux that MacOS users can only dream of, and Windows users can't even imagine.

Table of Contents

1. Features

   • On-screen keyboard
   • One finger hold
   • Two fingers swipe
   • Three fingers hold
   • Three fingers swipe
   • Four fingers hold

2. Dependencies

   • Required
   • Optional

3. Installation

Features

On-screen keyboard

When touching the screen, the on-screen keyboard appears automatically.

One finger hold

This gesture simulates mouse dragging, as it can sometimes be difficult to do on a touchpad. The mouse's left button is pressed after holding one finger for half a second and is released only after you stop moving the cursor, allowing you to adjust how long the dragging lasts.

Two fingers swipe

This gesture has different effects depending on the app:

Terminal	File manager
Switching between older and newer commands in the terminal	Navigating between inner and outer directories in a file manager

Three fingers hold

This gesture has multiple actions. It is best to combine it with two native functions of GNOME Tweaks: Middle Click Paste and Click the touchpad with three fingers for middle-click.

Also, most clipboard managers have the functionality to copy the text you select with your mouse. This allows you to paste different items on middle click, and others on standard paste (Ctrl+V) which this script emulates with a short hold of three fingers (less than half a second).

Hold between 0.5 s and 1 s to emulate keys: Meta+C - my shortcut for clipboard view.

Hold longer to emulate Meta+comma - my shortcut for resizing a window.

Three fingers swipe

Swiping with three fingers is used to switch between applications - by emulating Alt+Tab. Depending on how long you swipe, you can switch to different windows.

Four fingers hold

A short press of four fingers immediately triggers the "Enter" key. It has to be a short hold though, just tapping the touchpad is not enough - due to libinput's limitations (otherwise I would change it to a tap for higher convenience).

A longer hold of four fingers (at least 0.3 s) emualtes Meta+Space keys click - my shortcut for activiting the Fly Pie menu.

The above menu's configuration can be found in this file: fly-pie.json.

Dependencies

Required

This script cannot work without all of these dependencies:

1. libinput - it is the core of this script, used for gesture detection from your touchpad.

2. ydotool - responsible for emulating key clicks. It needs to be run with sudo, so you will have to add these lines into your /etc/sudoers file:

ALL ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: /usr/bin/ydotool
Defaults env_keep += "YDOTOOL_SOCKET"

Optional

Without these, the script can work but small changes will be needed (described below).

3. GNOME Desktop Environment - the touch screen gesture uses gsettings to activate an on-screen keyboard. If you're not using GNOME, you can probably find a way around it - for example with custom on-screen keyboard apps (but then just make sure to replace gsettings commands with the proper ones in run.sh).

4. Focused Window D-Bus - used by the getwindow.py script, which checks the current window name and enables app-specific gestures. I simply do not know another way to do that in Wayland, but I assume there are alternatives for non-GNOME users (getwindow.py would have to be rewritten though).

Installation

Once you have all the dependencies, make sure to run this command before usage:

chmod +x run.sh

If you want this script to always run in the background, edit this file: touchpad-gestures.service to insert the actual path where you will be storing the run.sh file, into this line:

ExecStart=/home/username/bin/touchpad-gestures/run.sh

and move touchpad-gestures.service into this directory:

~/.config/systemd/user/

finally, run these commands:

systemctl --user daemon-reload
systemctl --user enable touchpad-gestures.service
systemctl --user start touchpad-gestures.service
systemctl --user status touchpad-gestures.service # this one just to check if it's working

Enjoy!