 Hello and welcome to yet another episode of what's the status of the support of touchpad gestures and touchpad in general in Linux. Today we're going to talk about how we are today, what is to work next and finally who you should give money to apart from me obviously if you want the situation to get better. Starting off with a list of applications and how they currently support touchpad gestures. So Firefox as an example, how is it? So in 2020 on Wayland only, it was added the support to actually pinch to zoom on the touchpad and then it zooms on the webpage which is pretty neat. And then very recently around June 2022, the latest update of Firefox brought the possibility to also do a left and right two fingers swipe to go back and forth through our web pages. Now this only works on Wayland but you can make it work on x11 too maybe if you use the flag mods use x input two equals one. What about matter which is the window manager for GNOME? So we saw that with GNOME 40 we had a lot of gestures coming in again for Wayland only. So we have three fingers up and down to access the virtual desktops end up grid and left and right to switch between virtual desktops. Even cooler there is in development or maybe it has been done already I'm not sure the ability to do these two things like at the same time in what is as far as I know the first case of a linux two-dimensional touchpad gesture so cool. What about x11 though? If you do use that then there's plans to migrate matter to gtk4 and gtk4 does support x11 gestures out of the box so what you're currently waiting for is to matter to be ported to gtk4 that is what you should be looking for. What about kdplasma? Well if you've been following the channel you know that with kdplasma 5.25 my favorite release of kdplasma we had one-to-one touchpad gestures. Now there was something like that before but it was not nearly as good now it is. So it's a lot of gestures I'm going to quickly go through them you can use you can use three fingers swipe in any direction to switch between workspaces a three fingers pinch opens the overview a four fingers up gesture opens the desktop grid and instead a four fingers down swipe opens the currently open applications and left and right four fingers swipes still switch between virtual desktops if you disagree with them you might want to customize them but sadly there is no way to do that and it's not like kdplasma is against customizing the gestures it's that nobody has implemented that yet. What if you're on x11 though so there is currently no way to get these one-to-one gestures however we'll see that later I'll get back to it let's talk about chrome or chromium so we do have still some wayland gestures that is we do have the ability to scroll to refresh a webpage although maybe that was removed in a latest version I'm not sure you do have two fingers swipe to go back and forth throughout your browser history and if that doesn't work for you it might be because you're using an x wayland so an application which is actually thinking it's running on x11 but embedded into wayland to simplify things you can actually turn on wayland support inside of chrome going into the about flex somehow it seems like these gestures will only work if you click on the webpage before doing it if you click on the way you have to click on the webpage apparently and what about x11 there's not just currently an x11 and there's also no clear plan to bring any of them into x11 and it seems like it's a pretty hard thing to do so if you use chromium only notes you're out of luck on x11 what about gimp so in latest version of gimp you can actually use two finger pinch to zoom into the canvas the grantient editor and preview icons which is very cool and you can also now rotate the canvas when doing you know this I don't know what's the name a finger rotation swipe I don't know this likely enough works both on wayland and on x11 what about pdf viewers so let's start with ocular ocular has two fingers scroll however there's no inertia which is a bummer I think it's on wishlist like it's something that kitty would like to have but it's not easy at all to implement also lacking is pinch to zoom regardless of x11 or wayland and you can not rotate the document with the same thingy although weirdly enough all of that is supported for touch screen gestures however the pinch to zoom as a touch screen gesture works terribly so not great support for touch pads and it's not very clear if that's gonna change I'm not aware of anybody working on that specifically what about evince maybe gnome is better it is actually you do have two fingers scroll as before and you still don't get inertia at least on my computer maybe on gnome it's gonna work I'm on kd plasma obviously it does work however pinch to zoom which is nice you do have that but you still cannot rotate the document with the two fingers gestures which you might say why would you even need that I've got my reasons and if you were wondering my reasons is that sometimes I like to put my computer vertically and just read documents vertically so I just rotated the document 90 degrees and I just read it which is nice with that touch screen anyway next one LibreOffice so pinch to zoom has been recently implemented in LibreOffice I'm not sure if it's shipped already to the users and this is cool it's both for x11 and on wayland and even cooler it should work throughout the suite so regardless of what kind of document you're currently editing you should always be able to pinch to zoom and of course we already had stuff like two fingers to scroll however I still don't get inertia I do want inertia but okay fine okay so the situation is kind of this and these were the main projects some of course support them better some worse I haven't talked about every single one however you might easily find yourself in a situation where maybe you're using x11 which still lacks gestures for a lot of things or maybe you're using wayland but it's you're not happy with the current gestures okay is there anything we can do to change that that like can we improve that so our first solution is to use a third-party application that works as a touchpad manager as an example the most known one I think is Touchec Touchec I hope that's pronounced correctly and how it works is simply you tell Touchec these are the gestures that I want you can select how many fingers the whether it's a like a pinch or a swipe the direction anything you just tell Touchec everything of that and then you tell Touchec the action correlated to that specific gesture and then you just run it it stays in the background and reduces all of those gestures and triggers the correct actions which is super nice and even nicer yes it works for touchpads it also works for touchscreens so if you say a three fingers swipe to the left gesture is this it's gonna work regardless of whether you do it on a touchpad or on a touchscreen however I haven't been able to make it work for both at the same time weirdly enough but fine of course it's not a perfect solution it has some flows as an example it cannot support one-to-one gestures so obviously one-to-one gestures actually require you know communication between the touchpad gesture and the application was to show the one-to-one animation if you don't know one-to-one gestures are those that the animation that follow your finger as you're moving so those are pretty cool also I believe that it doesn't work on Wayland or at least it didn't when I was using it which was three years ago at this point yeah sorry for the outdated info okay what if you're using Wayland and you want better gestures so the proper way we could say is of course to implement gestures on the apps that currently lacking them and although most of us don't have the skills to do that to be honest I don't there's a project that is meant to address exactly that and it's called the linux touchpad like makebook initiative and that project has been going forward for two years now and fun fact most of the gestures that I've talked about in this video come from this project have been implemented by developers from this project so they do take donations through github sponsors so if you want the situation to improve I do think that throwing so many of them will make them go even faster and they do publish a yearly I think blog post talking about all the things that they have achieved and and I think this is super interesting they do polls on what should they work on next and they have just published their latest blog post just January 8th and they are taking ganzers in the poll and I think it's pretty interesting to see what are people saying because you know it gives us an idea on what people want and what this project is going to work on next so the main wish is still for more support for multi touch touchpad gestures which I totally understand and agree on let's just bring more touchpad gestures to more applications the second wish is two fingers scrolling becoming more like making touch which I guess also means heading inertia for a two finger scroll which we totally need please bring inertia to us you know it's the thing where you do this and then you leave it fingers up and the page keeps on scrolling for a bit and then it slows down that is so necessary give us that and then there's also an open question which is what projects should we work on next and since it's an open question there's just the list of answers and it's super long and we have stuff like blender, pinta, crita, inkscape all of these projects would totally you know benefit from some more multi touch gestures because I mean why not some of them already have some as an example inkscape does have quite some I think some of them haven't nonetheless I think this is a super cool project so if you're able to you know donate it to them on github sponsors there's a link somewhere unless I forgot that would be super cool and I think touchpad gestures in is one of the places where linux is improving a lot and however there's still work to do if it so happens that after donating to this project you still have some spur change I also take donations but I'm not working on touchpad gestures at all I'm just working on kidney plasma I'm working on stuff like making the floating panel better and also making the panel better as a whole and bug fixing that kind of stuff and it's kind of my daily thing along with this channel which is you know also sponsored through donations so my monthly goal is 700 euros we're getting closer and closer but also january is getting closer and closer to pink over so before I have to start again if you can chip it something to help me reach the goal I have patreon liberapay youtube support kofi everything you'd be able to be school otherwise don't worry about it I'm doing fine so thanks everybody for following and see you in a couple of days with a new video I lost my voice