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Nirmik
Asked: 2012-05-26 09:41:26 +0800 CST

Mac like MultiTouch support

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I don't remember how but in 11.10 I had managed to find a few multitouch actions to be supporetd by some software.

Now I am using 12.04, Is there any way/application/workaround/plugin or anything that can provide me with multitouch gestures similar to mac or atleast near to it?

With synaptics I figured out that my touchpad supports 3finger control.

I am using a Samsung NP-RV509-A0GIN.

multi-touch

3 Answers

  1. Touchegg

    Touchégg is a “multitouch gesture recognizer” for Linux, written in C++ , with Qt and utilizing Ubuntu’s uTouch-geis library. It allows users to define what actions are initiated when a multi-touch gesture is made.
    Providing the desired gesture is recognised by Touchégg you can assign one of a number of window-related actions to it, including maximize or minimize windows, resize apps, show the desktop, etc.
    Setting the ‘actions’ you want is currently achieved through the manual editing of a small configuration file.

    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.

    Note: It is having issue with precise. A bug is reported here and here

    Pre-requisites

    You need the latest vesion of Utouch to be running this. So add the following PPA 

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

    Installation

    In Quantal (12.10), Precise (12.04) and Oneric (11.10) the package is in the repositories as shown here

    Editing the config file

    Config file is located here
    ~/.config/touchegg/touchegg.conf

    Editing the config file: 

    gedit ~/.config/touchegg/touchegg.conf

    In the example below, the four finger drag gesture is configured to switch to Show Desktop

    Four Fingers Drag 

    [FOUR_FINGERS_DRAG_DOWN]
action=SHOW_DESKTOP
settings=

    Three Fingers Drag

    [THREE_FINGERS_DRAG_UP]
action=MAXIMIZE_RESTORE_WINDOW
settings=

[THREE_FINGERS_DRAG_DOWN]
action=MINIMIZE_WINDOW
settings=

    List of more actions here

    Thus you can get Mac like multi-touch experience on Linux systems.

    Check out a demonstation video here and here

    Which gestures are supported?

    The following gestures are suppoted

    Other alternatives

    Ginn

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  2. There's some great advice here: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1419833

    Easiest solution is probably just:

    • Go to System/Preferences/Mouse
    • Click on the touchpad tab and you can select two finger scrolling under the scrolling heading.

    If that fails, you may need to do something like shown below, depending on your hardware:

    xinput set-int-prop "SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad" "Two-Finger Scrolling" 8 1
xinput set-int-prop "SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad" "Synaptics Two-Finger Scrolling" 8 1 1
xinput set-int-prop "SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad" "Synaptics Two-Finger Pressure" 32 10
xinput set-int-prop "SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad" "Synaptics Two-Finger Width" 32 8

    You've gotta run at least these four (more in the link above), and you have to run them on boot, so you'll probably want to drop them into a startup script; preferably one late in the boot process.

    I'm not sure what make of touchpad you have, so you may have to do a little digging to get the right names and properties to set.

    To check your input devices for the touchpad, run xinput list and look under the pointer section. You should have multiple items in the list, and the one with highest id is likely your touchpad. If it's synaptic, you're golden, and the four commands above will solve you woes.

    If not, you must dig a little.

    In The second column of xinput list, each device has id=#

    Run xinput list-props #, where # = your device id.

    This will show you all the available properties for your input device.

    The commands above differ from my default settings from the return values of xinput list-props in that the 8s and 32s describe the size of the data being set. The second and third ints match exactly what xinput list-props returned, but going through the act of setting enabled two finger scrolling for me.

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  3. @Ashu's answer is pretty much to the point and really complete. But I would like to add one more point to it that would really make your experience better one.

    Firstly I am using Ubuntu 16.04 on my Asus ZenBook UX305 laptop, and touchegg worked very well for me in this configuration.

    You could customize your three finger left and three finger right drags to change workspaces, using as Ashu pointed out changing the config file for touchegg.

    (to open config file you can also go to home then Ctrl+H access hidden folders to find .config folder. Inside it there is a folder related to touchegg. where the config file for touchegg id present!)

    Opening the config file you can change the default action to the shortcut keys Ctrl+Alt+Right and Ctrl+Alt+Left for three finger drag left and three finger drag right. (hoe to do possible gestures are in the link provided by Ashu) . Doing this you can enjoy three finger drag in Ubuntu as well.

    I have uploaded the picture of my config file here in which i highlighted the edit i made from the default touchegg config file.

    (Make sure you enabled multiple workspaces in ubuntu with all workspaces aligned horizontally, in case you havent check How can I reduce or increase the number of workspaces in Unity?)

    You can also use this tutorial as it covers all my points and probably also fixes errors. (not sure)

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