Touchpad Gestures in Ubuntu 18.04 LTS

Out of the box, I get gestures for scrolling and right clicking. I'm very interested in three finger gestures (like slide three fingers up to see all open windows), but it seems there is no way to get those working.

I have tried with the Extended Gestures GNOME-shell extension and touchegg, neither of which are working.

Any ideas on how to get these?

Solution 1:

Fusuma

I am using XPS 15 with Ubuntu 18.04 (X.org). I have managed to get multi-gestures working for me. Kohei Yamada has developed an application called Fusuma to enable multi-touch gestures on Linux. It requires you to install Ruby on your machine if it isn't already installed.

Follow the instructions from fusuma GitHub's Readme page or you could follow these steps which worked for me:

First of all check if your current user is part of the input group. You can do that by

groups $USER | grep -w input # To check
sudo gpasswd -a $USER input  # To add

Then log out and log back in. Now install xdotool and libinput-tools.

sudo apt install libinput-tools  
sudo apt install xdotool

If you haven't installed Ruby you can do that now:

sudo apt install ruby  

Now install fusuma

sudo gem install fusuma  

Deciding your gestures

This is basically creating a .yml file with the desired configuration. If you want standard gestures you can follow these instructions or feel free to tweak around to get desired gestures.

Go to your config folder in home directory.

cd ~/.config    

Now create a folder named fusuma

mkdir fusuma  
cd fusuma

In there create a file called config.yml

touch config.yml   

Now you can use your favourite text editor to enter the contents in this file.

nano config.yml   

Copy and paste the following instructions if you are using GNOME, which is the default environment in 18.04.

swipe:
  3: 
    left: 
      command: 'xdotool key alt+Right'
    right: 
      command: 'xdotool key alt+Left'
    up: 
      command: 'xdotool key super'
    down: 
      command: 'xdotool key super'
  4:
    left: 
      command: 'xdotool key ctrl+alt+Down'
    right: 
      command: 'xdotool key ctrl+alt+Up'
    up: 
      command: 'xdotool key ctrl+alt+Down'
    down: 
      command: 'xdotool key ctrl+alt+Up'
pinch:
  in:
    command: 'xdotool key ctrl+plus'
  out:
     command: 'xdotool key ctrl+minus'

threshold:
  swipe: 0.4
  pinch: 0.4

interval:
  swipe: 0.8
  pinch: 0.1

Note that the gestures that this configuration has created for you are the following:

Mult-touch Gesture → Action
3 Fingers - Left → Go Next on Browser
3 Fingers - Right → Go Back on Browser
3 Fingers - Up → Show all Windows
3 Fingers - Down → Close Exposé (Esc
4 Fingers - Left → Next Deskto
4 Fingers - Right → Previous Desktop
4 Fingers - Up → Next Desktop
4 Fingers - Down → Previous Deskto

After this you can run the command in terminal to test if it has installed

sudo fusuma 

nothing will happen in the terminal. Just start using your multi-touch gestures - swipe away on your touchpad.

Now all you have to do is add Fusuma and the command for it in your start-up applications.

Solution 2:

Ubuntu 18.04 uses X.Org as the default display server instead of Wayland. The mentioned Extended Gestures extension currently works only with Wayland.

What you need to do is choose Wayland while logging in after a restart. This link shows the same procedure but the other way around (from Wayland to X.Org).