Customize Linux Touchpad Gestures with ‘Gestures’ App

If you want to set-up touchpad gestures on Linux, but don’t know how, you should check out the following app.

The app is called ‘Gestures’ and is described by its developer as being a “minimal Gtk+ GUI app for libinput-gestures”.

Windows and macOS both come with a variety of useful touchpad gestures pre-configured out of the box, and offer easy-to-access settings for adjusting or changing gesture behaviour to your liking.

Alas Ubuntu, like many Linux distributions, is a little lacking in this regard. Only a handful of basic gestures for scrolling and right-click available out of the box on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, for instance.

But by using the “Gestures” app you can quickly effect a set of custom trackpad gestures that are on par with other operating systems, and in some cases, far more useful!

Create Touchpad Gestures on Ubuntu

Customize Linux Touchpad Gestures with ‘Gestures’ App

Gestures provides an easy-to-use graphical front-end to libinput-gestures, thus saving you the need to craft a bespoke libinput-gestures config file by hand (or browse around to find a pre-prepared one online).

You can quickly enable trackpad gestures on Ubuntu 18.04 and similar Linux distributions, all based on whether you swipe or pinch the touchpad; the direction you move in; and/or the number of fingers you use in the gesture.

Customize Linux Touchpad Gestures with ‘Gestures’ App

For instance, you could create a custom gesture to trigger the GNOME Shell Activities Overlay when you swipe down with two fingers (using xdtool to bind the gesture to a keyboard shortcut).

You might also set up a custom trackpad gesture with a four finger pinch instantly opening the Nautilus file manager, launch Firefox, take a screenshot, or anything else you want.

How to Get Gestures

You can learn more about Gestures over on its Gitlab page, linked below.

There you’ll find a list of dependencies and build instructions for installing the app on your system:

Gestures on GitLab

Reading this post from Solus OS? Lucky you, as Gestures is available from the Solus repos.

Original Article