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 to and 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 scripts directory now contains two scripts for using the rotational gestures to change brightness or volume in kde. Thanks to rhuhle!
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.