Ubuntu – Are there other gestures for the Synaptics Touchpad besides two-finger scrolling

12.04gesturesmulti-touchsynaptics

I have a Synaptics Touchpad on my Dell XPS 14z and I was wondering if there was any way I could enable some gestures besides two-finger scrolling.

Are there any special drivers i need?
I've read somewhere that 12.04 has had some issues with multitouch gestures but I'm not exactly sure.
If there is a way, could someone give me instructions on how to enable (or get) these features?

I found some evidence that touchegg may not work with 12.04

Best Answer

Touchegg is designed to bring multi-touch (touchpad) functionality to Linux based operating systems. In layman’s term, it is an open source multi-touch gesture recognizer for GNU/Linux which is backed by C++, Qt and uTouch-geis library. With TouchEgg, you can define what type of actions are to be initiated for a specific multi-touch gesture. Numerous actions can be assigned for multi-touch gestures such as maximizing or minimizing windows, resizing applications, switching to desktop view, etc. It requires uTouch and evedev libraries.

Touchegg comes with some pre-enabled gestures, however gestures can be enabled by editing the config file. It allows three-fingers pinch, two, three, four and five finger tap and two to four finger swipes.

How to install?

add this ppa,ppa:utouch-team/daily as,

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:utouch-team/daily
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install touchegg

Which gestures are supported?

check here

How to use?

config file location ~/.config/touchegg/touchegg.conf

The config file can be edited in the following way:

open config file.

gedit ~/.config/touchegg/touchegg.conf

get list of actions here

# THREE FINGERS DRAG
[THREE_FINGERS_DRAG_UP]
action=MAXIMIZE_RESTORE_WINDOW
settings=
[THREE_FINGERS_DRAG_DOWN]
action=MINIMIZE_WINDOW
settings=

Similarly, in the example below, the four finger drag gesture is configured to switch to the desktop display.

[FOUR_FINGERS_DRAG_DOWN]
action=SHOW_DESKTOP
settings=

With Touchegg, users can easily define multi-touch gestures in order to get the Mac like multi-touch experience on their Linux systems.

you can watch a brief demonstration video. here and here

I found also this one

though I haven't tried it.

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