elementary / elementary/gala

Non Touchpad Gestures

Open
#1,772 0 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub
Needs Design
Dominant language
Vala
Stars
302
Forks
83
Avg merge
1d 1h
Merged PRs (30d)
7

Description

### Problem

It’s good that we now have 1 on 1 touchpad gestures. It’s giving access to people who doesn’t know the shortcuts to activate certain actions in a more natural way. However, not all devices have touchscreen or touchpad, people also use PC, which usually paired with a mouse and keyboard. Some people even don’t have easy access to both touchpad and keyboard, because maybe they use a display tablet, which limit their reach to keyboard and touchpad to activate actions like Multitasking View or swithing workspaces.

### Proposal

Implement a way to use gestures with mouse click and drag. It can be right click mouse drag or middle click mouse drag.
Possible implementations:
- Right click drag left to switch to the left workspace
- Right click drag right to swith to the right workspace
- Right click drag up to activate multitasking mode

### Prior Art (Optional)

For now, to have this “non-touchpad” gestures I use an app called easystroke. It’s an old app designed specifically for that. It’s not actively maintained now -I think- but it gets the job done for me. There’s a modern replacement for it called Mouse Actions but I haven’t tried it.
[easystroke](https://github.com/thjaeger/easystroke)
![easystroke](https://github.com/jersou/mouse-actions/blob/main/easystroke.png)

[mouse actions](https://github.com/jersou/mouse-actions)
![mouse actions](https://github.com/jersou/mouse-actions/blob/main/config-editor/mace.png)

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

Research direction

The issue names no files or tests. Start by locating Gala’s existing touchpad gesture handling and the workspace-switching and multitasking entry points, then determine how mouse drag input could fit alongside them. Done means the proposed mouse gestures reliably switch workspaces and open multitasking mode without disrupting normal mouse actions.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Domain
desktop
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
35/100

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