Create individual touchpad gestures - TUXEDO Computers

The KDE Plasma desktop environment pre-installed by TUXEDO OS supports a range of touchpad gestures. You can set up multi-touch gestures on your device, as you may be familiar with and used to from previous devices of other brands. This requires some configuration work, but makes the system even more intuitive to use.

Add your user account to the input group with the following command. After entering the command, you must log out of the desktop once and log in again or restart the computer.

sudo gpasswd -a $USER input

Use the following input to install the libinput-tools package and the required dependencies.

sudo apt install xdotool wmctrl libinput-tools

Download the library libinput-gestures from this location and unzip the file.

wget https://github.com/bulletmark/libinput-gestures/archive/master.zip
unzip master.zip

Then change to the libinput-gestures-master directory and start the installation.

cd libinput-gestures-master
sudo ./libinput-gestures-setup install

To configure your own multi-touch gestures, copy a template of the configuration file libinput-gestures.conf into the home directory.

cp /etc/libinput-gestures.conf ~/.config/libinput-gestures.conf

After copying, edit the file in any editor. The following command opens the file in the editor of the KDE desktop.

kate ~/.config/libinput-gestures.conf

The lines commented with a hash # are examples and explanations for gesture control. You can delete these lines or keep them for later. Attach your own gestures to the end of the file, here are four suggestions for useful multi-touch gestures:

gesture swipe up 3 xdotool key ctrl+F9
gesture swipe down 3 xdotool key ctrl+F12
gesture swipe left 3 xdotool key super+alt+Left
gesture swipe right 3 xdotool key super+alt+Right

Swiping up with three fingers shows an overview of the running applications. Swiping down with three fingers shows the desktop; swiping left or right with three fingers switches through the running applications.

Save your changes and start the libinput-gestures with the following command. To activate the service automatically, use the system’s autostart function to start it when you log in.

libinput-gestures-setup start
libinput-gestures-setup autostart

From now on, the gestures should work as previously defined. If not, a debug mode can be activated: To check the touch gesture recognition, stop the libinput-gestures service and start the function manually with the -d option. The output shows you the recognized gesture and the action associated with it, but does not execute the action. Exit debug mode with Ctrl+C.

libinput-gestures-setup stop
libinput-gestures -d

After changing the configuration file ~/.config/libinput-gestures.conf, you must restart the libinput-gestures service with the following entry; only then will your customization become active.

libinput-gestures-setup restart