Ubuntu – How to switch between workspaces with 3 fingers touchpad in Ubuntu 14.04

shortcut-keystoucheggtouchpadworkspaces

I am looking for a way to change between workspaces with my touchpad, I have found other questions like this, and I have tried theis solutions, but EasyStroke and Touchegg do not work.

I have an ASUS laptop and when running Windows my gesture monitor recongnize 3 and even 4 fingers. In Ubuntu when I touch with 4 fingers launcher is shown (like if I press Super key), but I can not activate 3 fingers swipe to change workspace.

I added this to touchegg config file:

<gesture type="DRAG" fingers="3" direction="RIGHT">
     <action type="SEND_KEYS">Control+Alt+Left</action>
</gesture>

Best Answer

Your touchpad is probably a Focaltech or an Elantech. They can report up to 5-finger actions.

The kernel module reports only positions of the fingers. All kinds of "actions" like "swipes", "scrolls", "taps", etc. are detected and interpreted by user space drivers.

In Ubuntu xserver-xorg-input-synaptics is used. It can detect only 2-finger swipes, vertical and horizontal.

There is no code that detects 3-finger swipes. The only way to add this feature is to code it into the user space driver.

There is another user space driver libinput, that will be used in future releases of Ubuntu and is currently used in some other Linux distributions, e.g. Fedora.

It can be installed to Ubuntu this way. But the problem is that it can be installed only through xserver-xorg. That is way it does not increase overall functionality, if I got the method right.

But it is worth testing.

In some other desktop environments like Wayland it may be possible.

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