KDE Visual Design Group/Gestures
Design Work for Gesture-based Input from Touchscreens and Touchpads in Plasma / Applications
Touchscreen gestures in Wayland will need to be implemented to provide user experience on par with that of other DEs and OSs. Keeping with KDE's principles, the default setup should be simple and intuitive, but the customization level should be high. For this reason, touchscreen and touchpad gestures should be identical by default, but can and should be distinguishable if the user wants to.
Keep in mid that here we are talking about "simple" gestures (swipe, pinch, rotate...), not "drawn" gestures (symbols, letters) which anyway are partially already implemented (although they do not seem to work at the moment).
For inspiration, the currently working Linux implementations of custom gesture software are:
- libinput-gestures (libinput only, https://github.com/bulletmark/libinput-gestures)
- touchegg (synaptics only, https://github.com/JoseExposito/touchegg)
Libinput (https://wayland.freedesktop.org/libinput/doc/latest/gestures.html), which is going to be used by Wayland, currently supports pinch and swipe with 2<=fingers<=4 (swipes with 2 fingers are usually reserved for scrolling). Atop of these gestures, additional possible gestures could be (as implemented by other OSs):
- 5 finger gestures (?)
- 4 finger tap (1,2,3 finger taps are already implemented)
- swipes from outside border (Sailfish OS - like, VERY useful!)
- rotation
By default, Plasma should be able to assign gestures to Plasma commands (change desktop, present windows, Krunner, close windows...) and custom commands/scripts. Shortcut customization based on application is also an important option (either based on the application under the mouse - better - or the active application).
Below are proposals for default Plasma gestures and application gestures, not considering:
- 5 finger gestures
- 4-5 finger taps
- "from outside" gestures
Note left/right may need to be switched if one does not want natural scrolling-like behaviour.
Default Gestures for Plasma
| Fingers | Direction | Gesture | Action | Screen/Pad/Both? |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2 | Pinch | Out | Both | |
| 2 | Pinch | In | Both | |
| 3 | Pinch | Out | Both | |
| 3 | Pinch | In | Both | |
| 3 | Swipe | Left | Both | |
| 3 | Swipe | Down | Both | |
| 3 | Swipe | Right | Both | |
| 3 | Swipe | Up | Both | |
| 4 | Pinch | Out | Desktop grid | Both |
| 4 | Pinch | In | Show desktop | Both |
| 4 | Swipe | Left | Next window (continuous window switcher, like keeping Alt pressed) | Both |
| 4 | Swipe | Down | Close window | Both |
| 4 | Swipe | Right | Previous window (continuous window switcher, like keeping Alt pressed) | Both |
| 4 | Swipe | Up | Present windows | Both |
Default Gestures for (Kirigami) Desktop Applications
| Fingers | Direction | Gesture | Action | Screen/Pad/Both? |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2 | Pinch | Out | Continuous zoom out | Both |
| 2 | Pinch | In | Continuous zoom in | Both |
| 3 | Pinch | Out | Both | |
| 3 | Pinch | In | Both | |
| 3 | Swipe | Left | Next tab/page/image | Both |
| 3 | Swipe | Down | Close tab | Both |
| 3 | Swipe | Right | Previous tab/page/image | Both |
| 3 | Swipe | Up | New tab | Both |
| 4 | Pinch | Out | Both | |
| 4 | Pinch | In | Both | |
| 4 | Swipe | Left | Both | |
| 4 | Swipe | Down | Both | |
| 4 | Swipe | Right | Both | |
| 4 | Swipe | Up | Both |