trackpad gestures for switching workspaces - Desktop Customization & Workflow

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freem
Nixers
(13-08-2020, 10:18 AM)mort Wrote: I've personally always used scrolling on my bar (always at the bottom across all screens) to switch workspaces. It's not a "gesture" as such, but it has the same effect, especially since I can just throw the cursor to the bottom of the screen and always end up over the bar.

This is something I do too, but it's really just scrolling. The point of mouse gestures is, you don't have to reach a specific screen area to trigger the action.

Mouse gesture was the killer feature of opera before they changed their internal renderer to adopt blink. It's one of the reasons why I'm still using vivaldi.

When I'm writing text, I think a good UI should be comfortable to use with pure keyboard.
When I'm rapidly switching tasks and tools, I think a pointer device is more comfortable, and thus I think a good UI should be comfortable with both keybard and pointer, in an "exclusive manner" (either pure keyboard, xor pure mouse) even if that's obviously ok if you manage to have something usable with both devices at the same time.

I already thought about using mouse gestures for my window manager, but never did anything in that direction.
Having an environment set for that would probably require much effort, since unlike keyboard, applications tend to "steal" all the 5 mouse' "buttons": right click, left click, middle click, wheel up, wheel down, and unlike for keyboard, that's usually not configurable.

It would probably require specifically designed applications for that to work. Applications which would *not* be using Qt, Gtk, or anything based on those toolkits (because context menu and the like a probably deeply built-in, and it would require too many changes to get it correctly).
Nowadays, for such an application to work, it would probably have to support both X11 and Wayland protocols. For X11, it seems doable: the thing is mature and complete. For wayland? I suppose it is very, very far from that point (that's the subjective feeling I have from each reading I do about wayland).


Messages In This Thread
RE: trackpad gestures for switching workspaces - by freem - 08-03-2021, 09:12 AM