I need help setting up touchpad gestures using libinput and xdotools. Can someone help me on this one?

General system Newbie
1

Greetings fellow humans, Human fellas.

I’ve been using Wayland together with the Gestures gnome extension to get touchpad gestures.

I’ve decided to try out X11 and use libinput gestures for a change.

I installed the gestures GTK app for libinput gestures.

From here, I tried adding my own gestures… they didn’t go well.

The gestures I wanted to implement are as follows.

  • 3 finger down and up: Cycle between overview and app grid.

  • 3 finger left: tab to the previous window(alt + tab left arrow key left arrow key )

  • 3 finger right: tab to the next window (alt + tab)

  • 3 finger pinch to show desktop: I have no idea what the command for showing the desktop would be.

  • 4 finger down: go one virtual desktop above(alt + ctrl + up arrow key)

  • 4 finger up: go one virtual desktop below (alt + ctrl + down arrow key)

I’ve tried to follow this https://www.linux.org/threads/xdotool-keyboard.10528/ to configure the gestures but it’s no use. My implementatoin must be incorrect, in addition to not being able to figure out how keyboard strkes are supposed to work.

Screenshot-20201011114006-626x342

How would I go about using arrow keys for gestures, and what is wrong with my current gesture setup?

Thanks

2

Not sure about the gestures app , but

may be worth looking at

2 Likes
3

I’ve gotten the commands working with xdotool and ydotool but the actual gestures seem to not work.
Thanks for those resources though, I’ll have to read through them later today.

4

On plasma I use gesture-manager:
image

Have you run:

sudo libinput-gestures-setup install && libinput-gestures-setup autostart

Oh - one thing to note, the shebang in gesture-manager needs editing, it should read:

#!/bin/bash
python3 /usr/share/gesture-manager/main.py

But there is an extra “\” in it (edit /usr/bin/gesture/manager).

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