Gesture bindings

If you are familiar with keybindings, you may even have reached the point where you can’t live without them anymore and your touchpad shines like on its first day. But what if this dead piece of hardware could actually extend your quick controls? With libinput-gestures you can translate touchpad gestures as commands, so I thought to be clever to call them gesture bindings by analogy to keybindings.

╭── From the defaults and beyond

By default, libinput-gestures supports all swipe and pinch gestures:

• swipe up/down/left/right
• pinch in/out

Because we always want more, libinput-gestures has us covered and you can enable extended gestures:

• swipe left_up/right_up/right_down/left_down
• pinch clockwise/anticlockwise

╭── Hold on, it’s not all

Version 1.19.0 added an hold option to augment the standard gestures.

A hold gesture is one where the user places one or more fingers on the device without significant movement. So instead of just configuring the usual swipe up/down and left/right each at 90 degrees separation, you can add the above extra 4 swipes to give a total of 8 swipe gestures each at 45 degrees separation.

Final thoughts

At that point, you should have run to test it out :) But if you need an extra argument to be convinced, I would say that libinput-gestures is configured with a single very easy file (libinput-gestures.conf) where your bindings are listed as gesture *type* *direction* *command*

For example: gesture swipe right xdotool key alt+Left

To get you some inspiration, here is my personal usage of this tool (commands are not listed because they are system-dependent):