twofingers-gesture

twofingers-gesture enables mouse / touchpad gestures with 2 fingers on Linux (X11, gnome).

Background and Idea

Unfortunately, libinput doesn't support 2 fingers gestures so users can't go forward/backward browser histroy, etc ... with 2 fingers swipe. However, other major OSs, Windows and Mac are supporting this feature even ChromeOS does.

Even libinput doesn't support 2 fingers swipe, libinput debug-events exposes 2 fingers actions with details like this:

 event6   POINTER_SCROLL_FINGER   +2.867s       vert 0.00/0.0 horiz -7.03/0.0* (finger)
 event6   POINTER_SCROLL_FINGER   +2.873s       vert 0.00/0.0 horiz -7.47/0.0* (finger)
 event6   POINTER_SCROLL_FINGER   +2.880s       vert 0.00/0.0 horiz -7.03/0.0* (finger)
 event6   POINTER_SCROLL_FINGER   +2.887s       vert 0.00/0.0 horiz -7.47/0.0* (finger)
 event6   POINTER_SCROLL_FINGER   +2.894s       vert 0.00/0.0 horiz -7.03/0.0* (finger)
 event6   POINTER_SCROLL_FINGER   +2.901s       vert 0.00/0.0 horiz -5.27/0.0* (finger)

This tool parses the lines and checks vert / horiz values and if the action was like forward/backward swipe then maps them to xdotool key ... and executes it.

This logic eventualy converts swipe actions to keyboard inputs.

Registering this to autostart

Write this file to ${XDG_CONFIG_HOME}/autostart/${name}.desktop usually ~/.config/.

[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
NoDisplay=true
Terminal=false
Name=twofingers-gesture
Icon=
Exec=/PATH_TO/main.py
Comment=
Categories=System;

Troubleshooting

main.py contains only ~40 lines with comments, you can easily understand that.

1. Run xdotool and verify it works.
2. Run libinput debug-events and verify it works.
3. Make sure that you are in input group.

The values in main.py are customized for my environment (debian testing on X1 carbon), you can watch libinput debug-events logs and update main.py.

TODO

Config, rewrite with golang