Not as sick as you might think. Building on the output of the synclient program, the Perl code presented here allows you to assign specific application functions to "Three-Finger Swipe," as well as open- and close-pinch gestures on your Linux laptop. So if you've been wanting your Linux device to act more like your iPhone, here's a start.
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Member since:
2006-07-26
Member since:
2008-06-12
I tried it out on a Thinkpad T43 running Ubuntu 8.04. First, some install tips for those too lazy to Google:
sudo apt-get install tpconfig libxtst libxaw-headers libxtst-dev
download and follow instructions to compile and install X11:GUITest, and Time::HiRes linked in the resources section of the article (simple and quick so don't be lazy like I usually am with libraries that aren't in the repo's)
After this i was able to run the perl script fine.
Having successfully run it, it wasn't as exciting as I expected. First, of the two gestures (pinch and slide), only pinch worked for me. And not very reliably either.
The gesture that I really want to see is two finger scrolling. I occasionally use a mac laptop of a friends and it is the one thing I envy.
Most importantly, I think this is a great start and will make it easy for some motivated people (perhaps myself, if I find the time) to make this more reliable and add more features.
Edit: the three finger sweep works now, though like the pinch not very reliably. All of the gestures seems to work best if you accentuate their start and end.
Edited 2008-07-03 05:26 UTC
Member since:2008-07-03
Member since:2008-06-12
Member since:2008-07-03
I don't know why it isn't mentioned more. It was implemented in the 2006-06-04 release, according to the changelog, so it isn't exactly a new feature. The driver is much more customizable than people give it credit for, there is a long list of tunables available.
I guess if the effort was put in to add these swipe and pinch features to the driver, they would work much better than this perl hack. The synaptics driver doesn't seem to be too actively developed though, the current version is nearly 2 years old.
Member since:2005-07-06
