This post is based on my Dell M3800 with Linux Neon.
KDE already does a good job with touchpad gestures (e.g., two fingers for scrolling, 3 finger tap for pasting, etc.) but it does not support 3 finger swype gestures like in MacOs, e.g., for displaying all the windows or for showing the desktop.
Today I tried this utility, Libinput-gestures, which works like magic! The utility comes with good default for typical gestures (including pinch) but I configured that to fit my needs (in particular, I wanted to mimic MacOs behavior for 3 finger swypes: up = display all windows, down = display all windows of the same class and for pinch out = show desktop.
The installation of Linput-gestures is really easy (just follow the instructions at its web page).
Remember that, first of all, your user must be in the input group, so first run
1 |
sudo gpasswd -a $USER input |
Then logout from your current session, and login again.
Then, in Ubuntu, it’s just a matter of running
1 |
sudo apt-get install xdotool wmctrl libinput-tools |
and install the software like this (you need git):
1 2 3 |
git clone http://github.com/bulletmark/libinput-gestures cd libinput-gestures sudo ./libinput-gestures-setup install |
You can already start the program like this
1 |
libinput-gestures-setup start |
and if you want it to be started at login time, then run
1 |
libinput-gestures-setup autostart |
The default gestures are in /etc/libinput-gestures.conf. If you want to create your own custom gestures then copy that file to ~/.config/libinput-gestures.conf and edit it.
These are the lines I changed in my configuration (remember that each time you modify the configuration you need to restart libinput-gestures, i.e., instead of start in the command line above, just use restart):
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 |
# KDE: Present Windows (current desktop) gesture swipe up xdotool key ctrl+F9 # KDE: Present Windows (Window class) gesture swipe down xdotool key ctrl+F7 # KDE: Show desktop gesture pinch out xdotool key ctrl+F12 |
You only need to know the keyboard shortcuts of the actions you want to associate to mouse gestures. With that respect, you might want to have a look at the current shortcuts in KDE Settings (the interesting components are “KWin” and “Plasma”):
This is a video demoing the gestures:
Happy gestures! 🙂