Ubuntu – Multitouch Trackpad Gestures Dell XPS 15

12.04dellgesturestoucheggtrackpad

I'm trying to enable some multitouch gestures to mirror what OS X is capable of doing, such as brushing three fingers across the trackpad to switch desktops, swiping two fingers to navigate back in nautilus or firefox etc. I'm trying to use touchegg, but I'm not sure if ubuntu sees my trackpad as a device with more than two finger support. Two finger scrolling works fine.

Does touchegg work in Ubuntu 12.04?
How can I find out if my trackpad (Dell XPS L502x) supports 3+ finger support in Ubuntu?
Are there any compiz plugins that might help?

I have a friend who is trying to achieve the same thing on his Sony Vaio, because he can do most of the aforementioned gestures in Windows.

Thanks for any help!

Best Answer

Touchegg doesn't work for me in 12.04, and seems its a confirmed bug:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/touchegg/+bug/918551

As for the rest I have no idea, sorry. Would like to know for my own laptop!

Related Solutions

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

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.

Ubuntu – state of multitouch gestures in 14.04 / Unity

On the latest ubuntu, all the advanced multi-touch only work from the touchscreen, not from the touchpad.

So what is left is:

scroll (two fingers drag up or down),
list of running software (3 fingers double tap)
launcher (4 fingers tap)

all the other advanced multitouch gestures are only available from the screen. I'm still puzzled by that design choice.

Touchégg seems to work with 14.04 (I'm on 14.10, can't confirm/deny) https://code.google.com/p/touchegg/