JoseExposito / touchegg

Linux multi-touch gesture recognizer
GNU General Public License v3.0
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Diagonal swipes #638

Closed haarp closed 1 year ago

haarp commented 1 year ago

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe

Gestures on other OS can involve diagonal swipes. This opens up open up a lot more flexibility and number of possible gestures.

Describe the solution you'd like

Diagonal swipe support in Touchegg

Describe alternatives you've considered

Well, I could live without them, but were's the fun in that? :)

Additional context

This was previously requested in #138, but that was before the change to libinput, so I think it might be worthwhile to re-explore these now. Other tools like Gebaar support diagonal swipes with libinput.

Thanks a lot! Touchegg is great :3

JoseExposito commented 1 year ago

I experimented with this option, and it is relatively easy to implement, however, while in a big touchpad (like for example the Apple Magic Trackpad) diagonal swipes are reliable, on a normal-sized touchpad I found myself hitting the wrong gesture frequently.

I think that for most touchpads adding this feature would cause a frustrating experience.

haarp commented 1 year ago

I get your point and you're right. Speaking from experience with Gebaar, it can be hard to hit the right gestures when there's 8 directions.

But shouldn't that choice be up to the user? Maybe they're good at getting gestures right, maybe they have a large touchpad.

Or maybe that don't want to use all directions, but those they do want to use include diagonals. I for one have an application where it would be sensible to have up-left, up-right and downwards defined as swipes.

Of course this is a question as to whether direction thresholds adjust to which directions are defined. If no diagonal swipes are defined, then an up-left swipe should be detected as either an up or left swipe, not ignored as an undefined diagonal swipe.

Anyway, thanks for reading!

JoseExposito commented 1 year ago

I get your point and you're right. Speaking from experience with Gebaar, it can be hard to hit the right gestures when there's 8 directions.

But shouldn't that choice be up to the user?

Maybe, but I prefer to offer well tested options that I (think that) work rather than dealing with bug reports or causing a "this doesn't work" feeling on users.

While, from the code perspective, this is easy to implement, I don't think it is a good idea to add it.