Gester is a gesture interpreting program for touchscreens, that I wrote for my Lenovo Thinkpad L380 Yoga. It has however been shown that this can run on touchscreens, touchpads and even a Nintendo Switch! The gesture interpretation is being done directly in the program, not relying on other programs, which does allow for easy addition of gestures. Right now there are 1-finger swipes from the screen edges, multi-finger swipes in up/down/left/right and rotations. Each gesture triggers a syscall, which can be set in the config.h file, and rotational gestures will have a value depending on the angle (scaled by a factor) appended. This allows for turning volume or screen brightness in a way that is supposed to feel more like turning a knob.
Everything that is supposed to be configured by the user can be found in the config.h file.
I took this idea from the suckless tools, which I really like.
When everything is configured correctly one can just run the commands make and sudo make install which will install the compiled binary into /usr/local/bin/ .
Currently the following gestures have been implemented:
- 1-5 finger swipes from top, bottom, left and right edges of the screen
- 2-5 finger swipes up, down, left and right
- 2-5 finger rotations clockwise and counterclockwise
The accelerometer data will by default only be read once after startup to avoid too much file I/O, however if the program receives the SIGUSR1 signal, the accelerometer data will be reread. I took this idea from using polybar, which also reloads in this way. I use thinkpad-l380-yoga-scripts to have my screen rotate, and just added a system call within that script to send the SIGUSR1 signal to gester.
I don't plan to add more gestures in the future,since I've noticed that everything I wanted is there, but I am open to suggestions.